City Commissioners vote to dissolve ethics committee
City Commissioners voted 3-1 during their May 20 meeting to dissolve the city’s ethics committee.
Commissioner Shannon Wilson voted in opposition and Susan Wolff was absent.
Commissioners established the ethics committee in 2017 to ensure city officers and employees are performing their duties in compliance with the provisions of state law and city code. They made the move after conflict of issues in that year’s Community Development Block Grant funding allocation process.
During the May 6 meeting, City Manager Greg Doyon said “I can’t remember exactly what triggered it all.”
According to the city staff report, commissioners are being asked to consider dissolving the ethics committee and instead adopt “a more objective and legally efficient process by deferring all ethics complaints directly to the Cascade County attorney, consistent with state law. This approach would eliminate internal conflicts, streamline the process, and reduce the legal and administrative burden currently borne by city staff.”
City considering dissolving ethics committee
The ethics committee was established to assess whether ethics complaints appear substantiated before referring them to the county attorney.
During the May 20 meeting, Jeff Mangan, former Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, who recently launched a project regarding campaign and political financing, said he was serving as COPP when the committee was formed and remembered it well.
“It was a point of pride that Great Falls chose to undertake this,” he said as a former city resident who continues to own businesses here.
Mangan said he’d love to see more local governments take the lead like Great Falls and Bozeman did in creating ethics committees and opposed dissolving the committee.
“I think the City of Great Falls can be a leader in this area,” he said and the commission could address the structural issues they’d identified as it currently exists.
Ethics committee deems complaint against Tryon unsubstantiated [2023]
He said that most counties don’t have an organized procedure for ethics complaints and “it goes nowhere.”
Mangan said it’s nice when a city has its own process and if a complaint were found to be substantiated, it would have some gravitas when referred to the county attorney.
He suggested the city engage the ethics committee members to help make Great Falls a more ethical place and city leaders could find a way to promote ethical leadership under their watch.
Commissioner Joe McKenney said Mangan’s comment about complaints going nowhere when they go to the county attorney caught his attention and asked for more information
Managn said that most counties don’t have a process for accepting and reviewing those complaints and they’re often not high on the priority list of a very busy office.
McKenney asked David Dennis, city attorney, if he knew the process if a citizen went directly to the county attorney.
Dennis said he didn’t know.
Cascade County Attorney Josh Racki told The Electric that his office does not have a formal process or form for the submission of ethics complaints.
City ethics committee finds complaints regarding heritage area unsubstantiated [2021]
Typically if someone calls or emails him with an ethics complaint, Racki said he’d asked them to participate in a formal meeting to gather what evidence they may have and if from that information it appears there’s cause to move forward with further investigation, he would do so.
Racki told The Electric that he is now working to establish an ethics committee within his office that would include citizen members to review such complaints.
He said he gets complaints from other townships, such as the Town of Cascade, and irrigation districts and most are handled informally.
Now, Racki said, he’s planning to establish a committee so if complaints are made, he’ll convene the committee to review and to determine violations and investigate as needed.
He’s working on creating the process for selecting citizen members of the committee and the formal process for handling ethics complaints.
Racki said state law allows him to levy fines for ethics violations, but that’s unlikely, and if the issue is criminal, his office will also handle that case.
Racki said he doesn’t get many and often they don’t have merit under the law.
Commission considering changes to city ethics committee rules [2019]
During their May 20 meeting, Mayor Cory Reeves said he likes referring complaints directly to the county attorney since the ethics committee process puts the city manager and city attorney in a bad position.
Commissioner Rick Tryon thanked Mangan for his comments but said “unfortunately, this process has also led to a vehicle for citizens to launch political vendettas and personal vendettas against commissioners and staff in the past.”
He said that he agreed with Mangan’s comments that there may be a way to do something different going forward, but to do that, they needed to first dissolve the existing committee.
Tryon said that he believed the three ethics complaints that were heard by the city’s ethics committee were personal and political vendettas, making it a longer drawn out process before going to the county attorney.
During their May 6 meeting, when commissioners were asked to set the public hearing on dissolving the ethics committee, Dennis, city attorney, said, “at the time, it probably looked like a good idea.”
But over time, he said the city has struggled to keep qualified members on the committee since they haven’t had much to do with only three complaints in three years, and they don’t have training.
“Decisions on ethics issues are really very difficult to parse out,” Dennis said, even for attorneys, and committee decisions were heavily influenced by the attorney guiding them.
He said referring complaints to the county attorney would make it look more independent as a separate government agency.
Reeves said “I think this is a no-brainer.”
There was no public comment on the resolution during the May 6 meeting and only Mangan spoke during the May 20 meeting.
City ethics committee hears first complaint regarding Houck’s social media post [2019]
Since its creation in 2017, the committee has heard three complaints, none of which it referred to the county attorney.
One of the complaints filed against city officials pertaining to the effort to establish a National Heritage Area also included a complaint against former County Commissioner Jane Weber. That portion of the complaint was forwarded to the county as it was outside the city’s purview.
According to city staff, each of those three complaints heard by the ethics committee “consumed significant legal and staff resources.”
Challenges with the current ethics committee model, according to city staff, include:
- the city attorney can be put in “the ethically precarious role of referring complaints involving elected officials with whom they regularly work”
- the city manager can’t refer complaints against commissioners “without jeopardizing professional relationships”
- “additional legal costs and administrative demands have been realized, with each hearing requiring outside legal counsel due to inherent conflicts of interest”
City staff said the most recent ethics complaint, filed against Commissioner Rick Tryon in 2023, cost nearly $4,900 in outside legal fees.
Dissolving the ethics committee would eliminate the need to legally staff the hearings, a cost savings of about $4,000 to $5,000 per incident, according to staff.
Doyon told The Electric on May 5 that there are no pending ethics complaints.
HUD closed case with city over CDBG conflicts of interest [2018]
Staff wrote in their agenda report that alternatives include minor improvements to the existing ethics committee such as revised submittal forms; eliminating the committee and referring all complaints to the Cascade County attorney; or establishing a new ethics review panel comprised of external appointees, which would still require staff time and potential legal counsel.
City staff is recommending dissolution of the committee and referring all complaints to the county attorney.
In a March 26 memo to commissioners, City Manager Greg Doyon wrote that commissioners had asked over the last year to consider alternatives to the ethics committee.
Doyon wrote that each complaint was different, but had some commonalities:
- ethics complaints take up a significant amount of staff time and legal department resources
- ethics complaints require that the committee retain a staff attorney as the city attorney or designee usually represents the alleged violator
- most of the complaints were filed against elected officials
- the city attorney serves at the pleasure of the city manager and is also a member of the executive team that advises commissioners the most.
Commissioners created the ethics committee after the city’s 2017 Community Development Block Grant allocation process was plagued with conflict of interest issues.
That year, there were complaints about Tracy Houck’s involvement as a city commissioner and Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art director at the time, as well as former Commissioner Bill Bronson since his wife worked for NeighborWorks Great Falls at the time, which was receiving funding, among other issues.
Rick Tryon was a vocal critic of the process at the time, before being elected in November 2019 to assume office in 2020.
Complaints from locals made their way to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, prompting a more thorough review from HUD, which declined funding for Paris Gibson Square and later pulled funding from NWGF, Great Falls Development Authority, Habitat for Humanity and Rural Dynamics, Inc.
Ethics provisions updates back on City Commission agenda [2017]
The city made substantial changes to the CDBG funding process following the 2017 round, removing the former council that reviewed the funding requests and often included members of the nonprofit community.
HUD closed the city’s case in 2018 and the city continued revising its CDBG funding process, which is reviewed by HUD through the standard process of submitting five-year plans, annual action plans and citizen participation plans.
“While very well intended, the current ethics complaint process inadvertently created real conflicts between the city manager, city attorney and city commission. I would argue that in some cases this would create unnecessary tension with other executive team members without having a referral process that is handled by a third party objectively,” Doyon wrote.
Some of those issues were primarily due to former city attorneys stepping in, creating an additional and unwritten part of the process by examining complaints to determine whether to refer them to the ethics committee, in some cases, “because the facts alleged by the complainant, even if true, would not constitute an ethics violation,” Doyon wrote. “While I understand the desire to do this, it simply created an expectation that the city attorney would pass initial judgment on the complaint, which is not part of the ordinance.”
Doyon detailed the costs of the three ethics complaints reviewed by the committee in his memo:
- Feb. 6, 2019, Jeni Dodd v. Tracy Houck: preparation, meeting, development of findings: $3,604
- Feb. 3, 2021, Jeni Dodd v. city staff, City-County Historic Preservation Commission, Big Sky National Heritage Area: $4,616.27
- Nov. 23, 2023: Jasmine Taylor v. Rick Tryon: $4,886.01
Conflict of interest concerns plague this year’s CDBG allocation decisions [2017]
When a complaint is filed against a commissioner, I am not going to be the appropriate person to refer a complaint–for obvious reasons. Under the current provisions, the city attorney does the referring. Although the city attorney does not answer to the city commission directly, the city attorney works very closely with the governing body for legal advice and policy direction,” Doyon wrote in his March memo to commissioners. “So, while I get to avoid potentially damaging my employer/employee relationship with the commission by not referring my boss/bosses to the ethics committee, the city attorney does not enjoy the same benefit. The city attorney is a trusted advisor to the commission on all legal matters. The potential of irreparably damaging that attorney-client relationship is very high as ‘the next’ referring agent in the current process.”
