I don't envy the job of the city's new independent Ethics Board.
Finally put into place last November, the board has spent the last four and a half months getting its operation up to speed.
The five-member board (there has already been one resignation, leaving four working members) has to hire a staff even as it attempts to follow the millions being tossed around to the candidates running for elected office.
Interim executive director J. Shane Creamer, a former Street administration official, is working along with two former Inquirer reporters to examine the finances of the candidates, looking for possible violations to the city's new campaign finance law.
Three people (plus legal counsel) monitoring the finances of more than 100 candidates in the middle of a mayors race.
It doesn't help, says the Committee of Seventy's Zack Stalberg and mayoral candidate Michael Nutter, that Mayor John Street took 45 extra days last fall to decide who he wanted to nominate to serve on the board. He didn't act until minutes before a press conference that was set to call him out on the carpet on the issue.
Give the board that extra time and maybe they could be further ahead, say detractors.
"Had they been appointed back in the May-June time period they would of had the summer to get ready for this upcoming election," Nutter says, pointing to the fact that the board was created by a ballot referendum last May.
Of course, as Street spokesman Joe Grace points out, there's no evidence that the board is missing any violations.
Creamer and his team seem to be working pretty hard behind the scenes, reviewing the year-end campaign finance filings candidates filed in January, looking for possible violations. He said there are about two dozen such violations being investigated; they can't be publicized until complaints are filed, however.
Still, the process of "staffing up" hasn't been an easy one, as the board's under construction office can attest. Dealing with civil service requirements has been an issue, as many of the jobs the board hopes to fill don't currently have civil service classifications. It could take more than a year in some cases to both set new civil service guidelines and get a qualified individual hired.
The election that decides who will run the city for the next four years will be over by then, millions having been spent to help decide it.
Those hoping that public corruption is a thing of the past have to hold their breath that the ethics board's small staff is up to the challenge.
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