Yesterday, commenter jpconnerjr linked to the NJ article about Paul Clark showily rolling out his “firewall” that is supposed to resolve the potential conflict of interest issues inherent in having the NCCo County executive married to the favorite land use attorneys of NCCo developers. This “firewall” consists of:
- Ordering his staff to “exclude him from all land-use cases handled by his wife’s law firm, Saul Ewing LLP ” (according to the NJ).
- Appointing a political appointee (in this case, the NCCo Attorney, but currently Acting Chief Admin Officer, Gregg Wilson) to make land use decisions in those cases where Saul Ewing are involved.
When I read this, I wondered how Paul Clark thought that he would fool ANYBODY with any of this. The problems here are many:
- The Chief Admin Officer is appointed by the County Executive — Mr. Wilson may in fact be a really honorable guy, but that is not the point. If you are eliminating a conflict of interest on the one hand, *looking* like you may be creating another isn’t exactly the solution.
- Wendy Danner, who was the council’s staff attorney, has been appointed as county solicitor. Ms. Danner is a former Saul Ewing employee. She take a position that has been vacant for some months, but wonder if there is some work to ensure that Ms. Danner is not providing advise or opinions on issues involving Saul Ewing.
- This one is the biggest one to me — this completely ignores potential conflict of interest in the development of land use (and associated) *policy*, which seems to be the place where there is longer term impact for the county.
Land use may be one of the biggest things that the county has to manage and one of the big things that impacts county finances, long term economic development potential and over all quality of life for residents (among other things). A policy stance that continues to whittle away at code and plans in favor of viewing every square inch of NCCo as a place to squeeze in one more building is a policy stance that has its thumb on the scale for developers and for their attorneys — not for residents. To be a real firewall — Paul Clark would need to step away from the policy apparatus involved with land use development in NCCo and maybe leave that completely to the County Council for the duration.
Whatever the long term solution is, this so-called “firewall” as detailed in the NJ isn’t even a proper fig leaf. And Paul Clark should task his transition team with the real task that needs to be done for him — and that is separate him from all county business (decisions, policy-making, departmental mission-setting and so on) that intertwine with Saul Ewing business interests for the next two years.