 The Los Angeles mayor's usurping of anticorruption rules could
spread to pols across California
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom recently attended
Cirque du Soleil and other events, and he will write up those tickets on
his city's "Form 700." Doing so will ensure that Newsom doesn't run
afoul of ethics laws designed to reassure the public that politicians
are not bought by gift-bearing corporations and rich patrons. Tony
Winnicker, Newsom's communications director, explains, "There's almost
never a time when the mayor appears in public when he's not in some way
carrying out an official duty, so in many respects he's never really off
duty as mayor." But the rules are so strict, Winnicker says, "To be
candid, we probably overreport."
When several elected officials from San Diego City Hall attended that
city's two Super Bowls, despite the major civic aspects to these huge
events, each politician bought his own ticket. Stacey Fulhorst,
executive director of San Diego's Ethics Commission, says simply: "They
pay for their tickets." When Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn
attended the Oscars in 2003, he paid $400 of the $500 price, getting a
$100 discount he duly reported as a gift. When he was thinking of
attending the Grammy Awards in 2004, he asked the City Ethics Commission
if it was okay for him to buy the costly tickets, using his
"officeholder" account — money he raised from supporters. It wasn't, and
he didn't. In this context, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa's behavior occupies a unique, new spot in the annals of
political ethics and freebies in California. Villaraigosa has
very quietly accepted — and even angled for — free tickets to as many as
80 pricey events, then failed to report all but one of them, as well as
failed to keep records of his actions or the sources of this largesse.
It is not known who gave him the tickets, or the precise number of
these events Villaraigosa actually attended, although it is known that
he frequently did show up. The 80 events, which appear on the mayor's
private official schedule, were recently sent by Villaraigosa to the
Ethics Commission amid an outcry from the public over his freebies. The Weekly
obtained a copy of the list. Click
here to see the Weekly's exclusive ticket-price values of
Mayor Villaraigosa's 80 freebies. According to L.A.
Weekly's calculations, Villaraigosa has taken tickets worth
$50,000, and perhaps as much as $100,000 — a staggering amount for an
American politician at any level, and more than he could cover with his
$223,000 salary and extensive family obligations. The top-end
value of those tickets is impossible to determine because, as the
mayor's office admitted in a Los Angeles Times article June 12
by Phil Willon, Villaraigosa failed to keep track of his free tickets
for the past five years. If true, there is no way to know whether he
took single tickets or frequently received multiple tickets to also
accommodate dates and family members. If he did in fact take two
or three tickets to events, the value could rise substantially, perhaps
reaching or topping $100,000. Read the full story, here.
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