As we reported earlier this week, Mayor Jerry Schweighart’s secretary was caught red-handed in a minor violation of a Champaign campaign ordinance prohibiting city employees from “intentionally perform(ing) any prohibited political activity during any compensated time.” It’s pretty black-and-white: no campaign activity while on the clock, and the mayor’s secretary was scheduling campaign appearances, clearly breaking the rules. No big deal; nobody needed to get fired or sent to jail or anything. A simple mea culpa on the part of the mayor’s office would have sufficed.
However, simple inquiries on our behalf about the incident went unanswered, the violation went strangely unreported elsewhere, and tension built until challenger Don Gerard sniped that “I wouldn’t want my secretary scheduling my campaign on city time” in Wednesday’s mayoral debate. In WCIA’s report on the evening’s events, they stated, “The city attorney says no rules were violated.” Wait… what? Sure enough, we reached City Attorney Fred Stavins (above) on the phone yesterday, and he confirmed, “I took a look at the ordinance and [the city employee’s actions] didn’t seem to fit real nicely in there. It [the accusation of a campaign violation] seemed like a political act.”
UPDATE (3:30 p.m., 3/18/11): Stavins called and left a message: “I think you misunderstood me. I didn’t mean to say that the accusation was a political act; I don’t know one way or another what that was. What I said was, ‘The secretary’s activities were not a political act.’ I hope that clarifies that for you.” We had a 36-second conversation yesterday, most of which was me asking the question, and I believe that I wrote down his end word-for-word. — Joel Gillespie
Stavins seems to be saying that reporting this violation benefits one candidate, and is therefore “a political act.” What does that have to do with anything? Alerting the press to the fact that John Edwards was funneling campaign money to keep his baby-mama silent is a political act, but it doesn’t make what he was doing any less illegal. Is there anyone who doesn’t owe their job security directly to the current regime who would be willing to say that there was no violation of an ordinance here? Is this the type of partisan legal advice that our tax dollars pay for? And isn’t it ridiculous decisions like this that make the fact that the city attorney is responsible for policing city employees a gross conflict of interest?
Make no mistake, this violation was not a big deal. However, the way it was handled makes the administration of the man whose Twitter profile trumpets his “Open, fair, and transparent government” even more of a joke. It’s not the crime; it’s the complete lack of accountability on the part of the mayor and the City of Champaign.
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