City, county scolded over ethics codes
Staff writers
Citizens took two governmental bodies to task Monday over conflict-of-interest questions.
Marion City Council was challenged about a council member’s relation to a recently adopted ordinance.
Marion County Commissioners, after being accused of attempting to intimidate zoning commissioners, abandoned a proposed conflict-of-interest policy stricter than state law.
City ethics questioned
During public comments at Monday’s Marion City Council meeting, resident Ryan Newell questioned whether council member Tim Baxa should have abstained from voting on a hospital-related ordinance because his wife is employed by St. Luke Hospital.
“No disclosure, no discussion recusal, no public acknowledgment that the council member’s spouse works for the only hospital that now benefits from this ordinance,” Newell said. “The citizens of Marion were simply expected to sit quietly and accept it.”
Two weeks ago, council members unanimously approved a zoning change that would require any competing medical service to be approved by the council.
The council overrode planning commissioners’ advice not to pass the ordinance.
Newell said he would request records, review meeting minutes, emails and other communication lines related to the ordinance. If facts support it, he said, he will file complaints with agencies that have jurisdiction over ethics, open government, and municipal conduct.
“This is not a threat; this is a notice,” Newell said. “Public office doesn’t entitle you to secrecy.”
Baxa voted Aug. 3 for the ordinance. City code states that members of the governing body “have a duty to vote unless such member choosing to abstain has a conflict of interest or other conflict that appears to make voting on an issue improper.”
A letter to the editor in the Record last week questioned the city’s ethics and argued that Baxa had a financial conflict of interest because of his wife’s role as a family practice physician at the hospital.
Mayor Mike Powers said that whether this posed a conflict of interest was a decision left to the council member.
“Other council members can’t say you have a conflict of interest, you need to recuse,” he said. “It’s up to the individual council member to make that decision.”
Baxa could not be reached for comment Tuesday. He did disclose that his wife works for St. Luke Hospital on a candidate ethics form when he ran for his position in 2023.
Powers criticized the newspaper for publishing the letter.
“It’s disheartening that the only media source in town can’t find one good thing we do. Not one,” Powers said. “We’re the dumb guys. The county’s the smart guys. There are people just ranting about, ‘This is just Marion.’”
County ethics questioned
At Monday’s county commissioner meeting, a new conflict of interest policy specifically for the planning and zoning board was to be voted on.
But it was summarily rejected without discussion by commissioners after they were confronted in open forum by sharp criticism from planning and zoning commissioner Brandy Smith and rural Goessel resident Alisha Weiser.
The two accused commissioners of creating a separate conflict of interest policy for the planning and zoning commission aimed at intimidating members.
“I find it inexcusable that a voluntary citizen board would be the aim when you have not applied the same ethical scrutiny to all paid and unelected staff,” Smith told the commissioners in public forum.
She termed it a “veiled attempt to disqualify, intimidate, and silence members of the board.”
The state recognizes the planning commission as advisory, and members are not required to file disclosure statements, she said.
“I am asking you to recognize that knowledge, experience , and community connection are not conflicts of interest, but in fact qualifications,” she told commissioners.
Weiser framed her objection to the proposed policy around insubordinate staff that she said were behind the pointed policy.
She took issue with the draft policy wording, saying “it equates a personal interest to a conflict of interest.”
By that standard, she said, “not a single person in the whole of Marion County would qualify to be on your planning board if you pass this.”
After hearing the criticisms, commissioner Clarke Dirks moved to disregard the draft policy prepared by county counselor Brad Jantz and use existing state conflict-of-interest policy. His motion unanimously passed.
The effort to hone county policy stemmed from a political flare-up in February over wind-energy development and the makeup of the planning and zoning board.
At that time, planning and zoning commissioner David Mueller criticized Dirks for circulating a letter to county and planning commissioners.
The letter, which was published in the Record, argued that Mueller, a former landowner liaison for the Diamond Vista project in northern Marion County, should have recused himself from a Jan. 29 discussion involving wind farms.
In response, Mueller accused wind farm opponents of wanting to stack the planning and zoning commission with fellow wind farm opponents.
Former county commissioner Dianne Novak raised the issue again at a county commission meeting last month, urging officials to state a clear conflict-of-interest policy.
After that meeting, there was confusion about who exactly — if anyone — asked for a new statement of policy, Jantz said. He drafted a proposed policy, anyway.
Commissioner Jonah Gehring characterized the proposed policy as “a tad bit tighter” in determining conflicts than the state code of conduct.
The board unanimously rejected it, he said, because it “overcomplicated things” that the state-level code addresses already.
Comments attributing the proposed policy to an unnamed county staff member have been clarified from comments included in earlier versions of this story .