I did not attend the meeting but was told by a foot soldier that the BOE told councilor Stehly they could not give her an opinion based on asking hypothetical questions. She did not tell them a specific petition drive she would be working on.

However she did argue that former councilor Staggers and Erickson have circulated petitions. Speaker of the House Mickelson lead a state wide petition drive and the county commissioners have circulated petitions in the past. The precedence is there. This isn’t rocket science.

It just sounds like they want to say NO but they need her to bring something forward solid so they can have a quasi-argument to say NO to.

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Where’s Waldo Huether? (he’s hiding in the back row-click to enlarge)

I find it interesting that the Ethics Commission would find it Unethical for councilors Erickson and Staggers to be committee members for the Minnehaha County Republican Party, but say nothing about Huether being a delegate for Obama.

Like I have said, I find NO conflicts with either. Huether serving as a delegate for the Democratic party for Obama has NOTHING to do with him acting as our mayor, just like the committee positions for the Republican party have nothing to do with the city council.

If Huether wants to assist his party, as do Erickson and Staggers, that is fine, and I find no conflicts. But there is a conflict. Why are councilors being treated differently when reviewing ethical behavior? I think someone needs to ask an opinion about Huether being a delegate, just as the councilors were. All is fair in Love and War.

As for Karsky, he really needs to resign from either the Chamber Board or the City Council. The Chamber works too closely with the council, it is way to close for comfort and an obvious conflict of interest.

As you may already know, the SF Ethics Board has been reprimanded (only as a board, not individually) for wrongfully accusing councilor Staggers of ethics violations.

Here is a list of the actual board members;

Mike McKnight (lawyer), Howard Paulson (lawyer), Bill O’Connor, Mari Robbennolt, and Bob Swanhorst.  Please note that two members of the board are lawyers by profession. This information is available on Siouxfalls.org.

R. Shawn Tornow was the lawyer from the City Attorney’s Office who advised the Ethics Board when the Board was dealing with his case.

The case began when two union leaders from the Fraternal Order of Police filed a ethics complaint against him with the Board of Ethics on April 8, 2010, five days before the first mayoral election on April 13th. The Board eventually determined that there was no merit to the accusations. They were truly frivolous claims.

This should have been the end of the matter, but it wasn’t because now the Ethics Board on their own and with the assistance of Tornow came up with two of their own ethics claims against him which he first learned about at the Ethics Board meeting of May 4th.  Kermit had his lawyer with him and they were both surprised how baseless these allegations were.

The first allegation was that Kermit was soliciting city employees in a letter that he sent to city employees. The sentence that they supposedly got him on read as follows:  “As a citizen, any suggestions that you may want to communicate to me can be done in the absolute strictest confidence by contacting me at my home phone, 332.0357.”  In the letter he never asked for money or for them to even vote for him.  The purpose of the letter was to simply inform city employees about his views on city government.

The second allegation contended that by serving as a Republican committeeman while a member of the City Council was a violation of a provision against holding another publicly elected office.

In a nine page-brief to the Board of Ethics Kermit’s lawyer demolished these allegations by saying that the act of soliciting deals with asking for money which he never did and that the holding of another elected office by the Board’s interpretation would have prevented him from serving as an elder in his church because he was publicly elected to that office. Obviously, the prohibition on holding another elected office deals with holding another publicly elected government office.

Despite Kermit’s lawyer’s brief, two days before he ceased being a city council member he received a confidential letter in the mail saying that he had been privately reprimanded by the Board of Ethics because of soliciting city employees and holding another publicly elected office. Kermit was instructed to keep this letter confidential. The Board’s issuance of a private letter of reprimand was an abuse of power because the Board of Ethics does not have this power; this power belongs to the City Council.

Eventually, he was successful in demonstrating that the Board of Ethics had violated the state’s open meetings laws, and for that the Board received a letter of reprimand.  Now he is trying to get the Board of Ethics to retract their illegal letter of reprimand against him.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_aVuS7cOIQ[/youtube]

KSFY Screenshot

This of course after the City Attorney advised the same in his testimony today in front of the commission. The city of course blamed Shawn Tornow for bad counsel to the Board and claimed the Board acted in good faith from his counsel. Of course it’s easy to blame a former city employee who is ‘no longer employed by the city’.

Staggers wanted individual reprimands of each board member AND the dates of the private meetings. He got neither request.

UPDATE:

ARGUS LEADER

KELO & KELO Part II

KSFY

Here is a detailed PDF of Kermit’s testimony and city correspondence;

staggersethics


Image: KELO-TV screenshot

Is Vernon defending Kermit over the bogus ethics investigation because he feels Kermit was wronged? Or is afraid it may be his hide next? Makes you wonder if the ethics committee was trying to dig up dirt on Vernon to?

Staggers is concerned that the investigation went beyond the scope of the original complaint. Something that also concerns city councilman Vernon Brown.

“Probably, the most disturbing part for us is the complaint was filed but the investigation went beyond what the complaint was,” Brown said.

And let’s hear the bullshit response . . .

Mike McKnight, the chair of the Board of Ethics, says local laws give them the ability to go where the evidence takes them, and if any changes were made to that part of the law, it would limit their work.

LMAO! You mean the same ‘unconstitutional’ laws that tell people when they are in violation of city code? A city can’t just make up laws that are in violation of the US Constitution and the State Constitution and then use those bogus laws to assert power. Kermit nails it with this comment;

“In making it public then they’re going to be held accountable. When you have a situation where things are done in secret, accountability goes by the wayside,” Staggers said.