The Riverside City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve revisions to the city’s code of ethics, which includes a change in how the community-led board responsible for overseeing allegations of ethical misconduct reviews evidence prior to an official hearing. Councilmembers Steve Hemenway and Clarissa Cervantes were absent.
The change was approved as part of the required annual review process. Councilmember Philip Falcone, who chairs the Governmental Processes Committee (GPC), explained to the council that the code of ethics is reviewed by every board and commission, which then makes recommendations for potential changes. He added that, in total, six of the seven recommendations were being reviewed by the full council, as well as three other changes brought by the council-led processes committee.
The three recommendations submitted by the GPC all related to how the Board of Ethics reviews evidence during its pre-hearing meeting.
“The pre-trial issue, it’s a freaking mess right now,” Councilmember Chuck Conder said at the December 9 meeting. “In the rules procedures for the Board of Ethics, they must take the evidence from the applicant as being factual, and that’s just not right.”
When there is an allegation of misconduct, the city’s Board of Ethics, made up of nine community members, holds a meeting before the official hearing to review the evidence included in the complaint. The procedure previously stated that the members were to review the evidence as if it were true to see if it sufficiently showed the possibility of an ethical violation.
The updated code of ethics changed that section of the pre-hearing procedure to remove the verbiage on reviewing the evidence as true. It also added a sentence stating that the evidence should “be taken in its totality, with equal weight given to both parties.”
“So this then just seeks to strike that finer equality there of looking at all the evidence presented,” Falcone said at the meeting.
The change came a few months after lawyers for a cannabis business filed a Brown Act violation complaint that incorrectly identified a city employee as Councilmember Jim Perry, according to a report from The Raincross Gazette. The complaint was later withdrawn.
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Perry, in a November 18 GPC meeting, pushed for the removal of the phrase, saying it allowed the ethics review process to be weaponized.
“If we’re not going to change this, we may as well just probably do away with the pre-hearing,” Perry said at that meeting. “All they have to do is to show whether it’s true or not.”
At the December 9 meeting, Councilmembers Steven Robillard, Sean Mill and Conder agreed with Perry’s sentiment that the ethics review process has been weaponized, pointing to the process the now withdrawn complaint went through.
“I don’t think at our pre-hearing, the evidence was weighed fairly,” Mill said. “In fact, I heard members of the ethics board, multiple times, say: ‘Well, you know, we got to believe this complaint to be true, otherwise they wouldn’t be making it.’”
Several residents, however, voiced their concerns during the meeting about the changes to the pre-hearing procedure language. Some, including Danielle Kilchenstein who serves on the Board of Ethics, said they felt the changes created unnecessary confusion.
“The pre-conference stage is designed to identify whether a complaint merits further review, not to approximate the evidence considerations of a full hearing,” Kilchenstein said. “By raising the level of analysis required to determine whether a complaint proceeds, it could deter participation and result in reduced accessibility for individuals unfamiliar with the process.”
During her comment, Kilchenstein also added that the council could instead look to further train the Board of Ethics’ volunteer members on the process.
Others said the council could direct the Office of the Inspector General, once the role is filled, to work with the Board of Ethics on how it handles ethics misconduct complaints.
The council also approved other updates to the code of ethics, including adding whistleblower protections to individuals who allege an ethics violation and expanded complaint eligibility to vendors and contractors. The council also declined to act on a recommendation by the Board of Ethics to increase the statute of limitations to submit a complaint to two years, choosing instead to keep it at one.
The city council also discussed adding new sections addressing online conduct, but opted to send that back to the Board of Ethics and the GPC for further review.
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