As news of San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales’s indictment for
allegedly taking bribes grabs headlines nationwide, two Morgan Hill
city officials have coincidentily been busy this week brushing up
on ethics skills to share with their colleagues.
Morgan Hill – As news of San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales’s indictment for allegedly taking bribes grabs headlines nationwide, two Morgan Hill city officials have coincidentily been busy this week brushing up on ethics skills to share with their colleagues.
Morgan Hill City Council members Steve Tate and Greg Sellers were among several Bay Area local government officials who attended the first annual Ethics and Leadership Camp for Public Officials at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. The camp’s tuition was $1,000 per city official, but Tate said he and Sellers attended on scholarships offered by the Markkula center.
Following the two-day workshop, which was facilitated by ethics commissioners and academics from around the country, Tate and Sellers each said the program offered tools for handling ethical dilemmas in Morgan Hill, a small town where sometimes it feels like everybody knows each other’s name, and private and public interests are prone to overlap.
“You know a lot of people, and we have a lot of relationships, so we need to be real clear on what those mean,” Sellers said, adding he once had to recuse himself from voting on a land-use decision because he had discussed getting involved financially.
Tate said even though he doesn’t think Morgan Hill faces too many major ethical problems these days in its city government, he is glad officials last year enacted an ethics code to emphasize honesty and integrity.
Morgan Hill City Manager Ed Tewes said the code applies to city council members and members of the city’s public commissions.
“We went through a long process to adopt a values-based approach rather than a rules-based approach,” Tewes said, adding that the code will be re-evaluated every year, and city officials re-trained based on added revisions.
Asked how the arrest of Gonzales affects Morgan Hill’s government, Tewes said it reinforces the need for governments to be transparent to earn the public’s trust.
“It’s very regrettable,” he said of Gonzales’s predicament. “It’s not only a tragedy for San Jose, but regrettable for all local governments whenever an official is called into question in the legal system.”
The Markkula center’s ethics camp for public officials was the brainchild of Markkula senior fellow Judy Nadler, who set a high standard of ethics as mayor of Santa Clara.
Nadler, who spoke last year at a Leadership Morgan Hill event, said she came up with the idea for the workshop after participating in a similar program for high school teachers last year at the Markkula center. Nadler said she spent the last year and a half developing the curriculum, which brought together both elected officials, city department directors and ethics commissioners from as far away as Florida.
The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor each ran articles this week on the camp.
Tony Burchyns covers Morgan Hill for The Times. Reach him at (408) 779-4106 ext. 201 or tb*******@*************es.com.
