The rules regarding how the city proceeds with ethics complaints against council members, staff and advisory board members have been changed. 

Proposed amendments were approved by the city’s Council Culture and Society meeting in February and presented to the council on March 17, which made changes and approved the new policy.

Given that there are outstanding ethics complaints against them, Mayor David Faber and council members Amy Howard and Libby Wennstrom recused themselves from the discussion and vote. City Manager John Mauro, who is also the subject of an ethics complaint, recused himself as well. 

Several amendments approved in February by the Culture and Society committee, which included Howard and city council members Ben Thomas and Owen Rowe along with the city’s attorney, were scrutinized and in some cases rolled back before being approved by the remaining council members, Owen Rowe, Monica MickHager, Ben Thomas and Neil Nelson. 

Council waived the typical second reading of the changes in doing so. 

The new code requires that all complaints be filed with the city clerk. The city clerk or a separate designee will be tasked with receiving all ethical complaints to determine the completeness of the complaint. The new code also gives the city clerk or their designees the authority to reject complaints they deem incomplete. 

The code establishes that for complaints relating to city employees, officials and members of advisory boards, the supervisor or appropriate individual deemed by the city manager will investigate the complaint and report back to the city manager. The city manager determines if the complaint should or should not move forward to the hearing examiner. 

Complaints against the city manager or council members will be automatically assigned to the hearing examiner. 

The approved changes include preventing the hearing examiner from doing their own examinations. It also maintained the statute of limitations at three years since the violation or one year since the discovery of a violation. The initial proposal would have reduced it to one year across the board.  

The policy limits standing to current employees and business owners within city limits, current or former residents, or anyone who has done business with the city. The prior policy let anyone file a complaint. 

If the city clerk rejects a complaint, the rationale for the rejection will be shared with the complainant, who is welcome to resubmit. 

The proposed changes also recommended adding a sentence stating “no person shall knowingly file a false complaint, or a false or frivolous report of violation in this code of ethics.” Council removed the word frivolous for the final version of the policy.   

Two community members spoke in opposition to the proposed changes during the public comment period before the council voted. 

“I am urging the city to slow down on making any changes to this ordinance. The perception of making changes in a rush is pretty bad given what is going on in Washington D.C. right now,” said Port Townsend resident David Johnson. He noted a spate of recent ethics complaints against members of council and Mauro, saying the prior policy had been “misused recently.” Even so, Johnson said he thought that was “insufficient to make the proposed changes that are being offered here.”

Johnson took issue with many of the proposed changes, including two that passed, such as the hearing examiner’s inability to independently investigate claims, and the city manager’s ability to throw out complaints against staff if he determined they were incomplete. “I would hope that you would take time to go through this further and rethink these issues,” he said.

Julie Jaman also spoke, urging the city to expand the proposed standing requirement and questioned the city clerk’s ability to deem complaints incomplete.  

“My address is Port Townsend but I live outside of the city limit. I lived inside the city limit for years,” she said.” I shop locally and I pay sales tax. So, I think your issue on standing is not as helpful as you hope it would be, it precludes people that have an interest.” 

Having several members of the council recuse themselves presented challenges. 

“If we get down to three, we cannot do business. So, I want to support waiving council rules because to me this is an emergency,” said MickHager, who was referring to the recent influx in ethics complaints and the subsequent recusals. “I’m comfortable moving forward with this because we’ve been working on this. To give it another read isn’t as important to me.” 

Rowe reminded MickHager that any subsequent recusals would only affect matters related to ethics code changes and in no way alter the council members involvement in other matters.