Former Spokane sustainability leader calls for reforms of city’s ‘broken’ ethics complaint review process
A former city official is calling for reforms of Spokane’s ethics review process, which she says can be used to harass city employees.
She is not alone. Former and current City Council presidents who have successfully defended against their own ethics complaints agree that reforms are needed.
Kara Odegard resigned in mid-December amid a review of an ethics complaint that she has said was drawn out and poorly handled. The Spokane City Council’s former manager of sustainability initiatives outlined her concerns in a Dec. 29 letter to Mike Piccolo, the city’s human resources director.
“ I am out the fees I had to pay an attorney for representing me before the Commission and my reputation has been attacked publicly,” she wrote.
Odegard was hired in 2019, primarily to update the city’s multiyear sustainability plan, which eventually included dozens of people who volunteered to participate in drafting it. Nearly everyone who wanted to be involved was included, Odegard told The Spokesman-Review, out of a desire to include diverse viewpoints.
Larry Andrews, who owns local HVAC company Andrews Mechanical, was appointed in early 2022 as a volunteer member of one of the various work groups fleshing out plans for how the city would implement its sustainability goals.
In September, Andrews filed a complaint alleging Odegard had violated a number of city ethics rules, including using her work for the city to promote her private consulting company, Measure Meant. He further alleged that Odegard had not disclosed that she worked for a consulting company, among other complaints.
Odegard has denied any wrongdoing and stated that she was hired in large part because of her work with Measure Meant. Council President Breean Beggs, who had been her direct supervisor, has confirmed this.
Odegard argued she should have been warned if there were an issue, and the city should have issued an advisory ruling on whether there is a conflict. Failing to do so unfairly puts employees at risk of an unexpected ethics complaint and related legal fees despite a good faith effort on the employee’s part, she added.
Odegard further painted Andrews as a disruptive climate change skeptic who used his role on the work group to disrupt meetings and disparage other members. She claimed that when Andrews was unable to get the results he wanted, he filed the complaint against her.
Andrews has previously called Odegard’s characterization of his motivations as an attempt to distract from “a clear case of unethical behavior.”
But Odegard has raised issues with not just the complaint leveled against her, but how the volunteer-run Ethics Commission went about reviewing it.
She argues that not only were some allegations incorrect, others were not under the jurisdiction of the Ethics Commission, and that the commissioners did not seem to understand this. She added that the commission made arbitrary and inconsistent decisions that further disadvantaged her.
Salvatore Faggiano, assistant Spokane city attorney and staff director for the Ethics Commission, did not respond to requests for comment.
In her letter to Piccolo, Odegard called for better education for the members of the commission, and for making the complaint review process more streamlined and orderly.
She also called on the city to pay the legal fees of an employee who is found not to have violated the city’s ethics code.
“An employee faced with a complaint is unequipped to defend without help,” Odegard wrote.
“I have to emphasize, no one at the City helped me through this,” she added. “Once accused, I was left on my own to respond and then left to wait and wait while the City ran out the clock.”
Odegard stressed that her complaints were not with individual employees of the city, nor with the city itself, but with a process she believed was broken.
In an interview, Beggs said he was sympathetic with Odegard’s complaints and expressed interest in reforming the ethics complaint process. He also faced an ethics violation complaint in 2022, though it was eventually dismissed.
Beggs said he also felt the commission demonstrated an “expansive view” of what kinds of complaints it would review. When the current ethics review process was being established, he added, the city considered an alternative system in which an independent attorney would screen out meritless complaints before they were reviewed by the full commission.
Without that first line of defense, Beggs said he felt the complaint process was being used in ways not envisioned when it was created.
Beggs’ predecessor, former Council President Ben Stuckart, agreed and said it has been “weaponized.”
Stuckart said he had more complaints filed against him than any other elected official in the city’s history. Though the Ethics Commission in 2014 found he violated city rules by forwarding a confidential email, resulting in a $250 fine, five subsequent complaints were dismissed.
“The other five were completely meritless, yet I still have people telling me I’m an unethical person, which is the furthest thing from why I was in public service,” Stuckart said. “There should be a way to review complaints and dismiss them when they don’t have merit without it becoming a public spectacle.”
The current iteration of the city’s Ethics Commission was authorized by City Council ordinance in 2015 and enforces a city code of ethics that was approved the same year.
Of the 33 complaints in the last seven years, most were leveled against city leaders, such as the mayor, City Council members or department heads. Of those, all but two were dismissed or withdrawn.
In 2015, then-Spokane City Administrator Theresa Sanders was fined $75 after the ethics commission found she had been dishonest in interviews with The Spokesman-Review.
In 2019, Councilwoman Karen Stratton was issued a written reprimand after the commission found she had violated ethics rules when she sent a letter to the city of Pasco advocating on behalf of a Spokane marijuana retailer hoping to locate there.
Stuckart and former Mayor David Condon were the combined subject of a nearly a third of the city’s complaints between 2015 and 2018, though none resulted in discipline.
Condon declined an interview for this story.