Time to institute anti-nepotism rule
In most cases, encouraging your child to follow his dreams is laudable. In most cases.
In Spokane County Commissioner Phil Harris’ case, however, we have an exception.
When the commissioner’s son Stephen asked him if it was OK to apply for an opening in the county Building and Planning Department, the response was to go for it. Better advice would have been: Look somewhere else.
“I said, ‘Son, you have a right to apply for a job just like anybody else.’ ” explained the commissioner.
Legally, perhaps, but as a matter of sound public policy, nepotism is a bad idea.
So Stephen Harris did apply for the $33,450-a-year job as a development assistant coordinator – one of 34 candidates – and guess what? All 33 of the others were judged less suited for the position than young Harris, who moved back to Spokane after his California battery business shut down.
The decision wasn’t even close, according to Pam Knutsen, assistant director of the Building and Planning Department. “He was my clear choice,” Knutsen told Spokesman-Review reporter Amy Cannata.
Thus, Phil Harris now has not one but three sons employed by the county government, over which he shares policy-making and budget-setting authority with two fellow commissioners. Ron Harris is a road maintenance worker and Mark Harris performs maintenance services at the county Fair and Expo Center. All three county-employee offspring were hired after Harris was elected to the board of commissioners in 1994.
Harris, the commissioner, says he took no part in the hiring decision involving his son, and Knutsen adamantly concurs. We’ll take them at their word, although that’s not really the point.
The real issue – one both Harris and Knutsen acknowledge they anticipated – is that it looks bad.
Indeed it does. It fails the smell test. It undermines citizens’ faith in the evenhandedness of a government that impacts their lives and spends millions of their tax dollars.
As a matter of fact, the county nepotism policy has rules designed with those very concerns in mind. Close family members aren’t to be hired if one would supervise or audit another, if it creates a potential conflict of interest, if it would jeopardize confidentiality, or if it would create “the reality or appearance of improper influence or favor.”
Readers can use their own judgment in deciding whether hiring County Commissioner Phil Harris’ sons crosses any of those lines or whether he would have to actively intercede for his political position to influence the way his sons are treated as job applicants or employees.
In our opinion, it isn’t enough that the county has a nepotism policy. It needs an anti-nepotism policy.