Mayor should clear air on complaint
Last month, an investment adviser named Ron Johnson filed a complaint with the city's Independent Ethics Commission. Johnson claims to have seen financial statements proving that Mayor Lionel Rivera, in his daytime capacity as a financial adviser, had a "direct financial relationship" with Ray Marshall, the developer chosen by the city to build the new United States Olympic Committee headquarters. Johnson rightly maintains that the mayor shouldn't reward his private clients with public contracts.
Thus far, the ethics commission says it hasn't seen enough proof to act on Johnson's accusations, and certain people want the story to end there. Last week, Councilmember Jerry Heimlicher wrote Johnson an e-mail saying, "I consider elected folks innocent until proven guilty just as is the right of all Americans," adding, "Your approach of using the press as your information agent is totally unfair to an impartial hearing."
The problem is that the city's commission is even more "unfair to an impartial hearing." I've never heard of an "impartial hearing" where the accused was allowed to choose his own judges, but all three members of the city's "independent" commission were appointed by the mayor and City Council. Two of the three have flagrant conflicts of interest which, if Rivera were standing a real trial, would prevent them from presiding over his case.
Until 2005, Stephen Hook, the commission's chairman, served as deputy city attorney, which means that the accused was recently his boss.
Jan Doran, a longtime political activist, is even more compromised, because she publicly endorsed the mayor when he ran for Congress in 2006 and for mayoral re-election in 2007. On Tuesday, Doran told me, "Regardless of whether I endorsed him has nothing to do with my sitting on the commission." She also said that "people who know [her]" would vouch for her fair-mindedness.
Doran and Hook might be the most honest people in the world, but no amount of good faith can make them look like impartial judges.
The question for Heimlicher is why, instead of telling Ron Johnson to "put up or shut up," he doesn't urge the mayor to clear the air himself. If the mayor would just say, "No, I've never had a private financial relationship with Ray Marshall," many people would take him at his word. But Rivera has never been willing to make that statement, even though rumors of impropriety began percolating as soon as the original contract was signed.
Rivera maintains that confidentiality prohibits him from saying whether Marshall has ever been a private client. But those rules ceased to apply the moment that Rivera, in his role as mayor, signed a public contract with Marshall. By signing that contract, the mayor declared with his actions that he didn't have a private financial relationship with Marshall. Now Rivera is simply being asked to make the same declaration with words.
The mayor should understand that his behavior leads people to conclude he's guilty. There's only one logical explanation for the mayor's silence: the truth would confirm that he acted unethically, while a lie would be exposed as such when documents finally surface.
The ethics commission seems poised to dismiss the complaint over a technicality: the mayor's alleged breach took place 14 months ago, while the commission's mandate extends back only 12. Unfortunately, that result won't restore anybody's trust in government. There's only one person who can put this scandal to rest, and that's Mayor Lionel Rivera himself.
Our councilmembers should pressure Rivera do the right thing. Granted, telling the mayor to come clean might require a little more courage than telling a constituent to "shut up," but I still believe Jerry Heimlicher can rise to the occasion.
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Cole, of Colorado Springs, is a writer, translator and political organizer. Readers can reach him at dancoloradan@yahoo.com.
