SCRANTON — The newly revived ethics board got its first complaint a few weeks before it held its inaugural meeting, but only recently received the letter from City Hall, members said tonight.
The anonymous complaint mailed Sept. 19 in a standard white business envelope already had been opened by an unknown person when it was received Sept. 24 by the city’s Law Department, ethics board Chairwoman Joan Hodowanitz informed her colleagues Thursday during their third meeting.
The letter had a printed label addressed to “Scranton Ethics Commission, City of Scranton, Scranton PA, 18503,” had a postage-cancellation mailing date of Sept. 19, 2019 processed from the Lehigh Valley and no return address.
The envelope had an internal City Hall date stamp as received by the Law Department on “Sept. 24, 2018,” from a stamp obviously set to the wrong year, board members said.
The ethics board held its first and second meetings on Oct. 10 and Oct. 24.
The situation of a complaint opened by someone and “floating around City Hall” for over a month before being given to the ethics board highlights the board’s struggle to get fully up and running, Hodowanitz said.
“It was opened before given to me. It is an anonymous complaint, which means there’s probably not much we can do about it,” Hodowanitz said. “But this is one of the reasons why I’m going to be pushing for us to get the resources of a staff, office space, locking file cabinet and ... Post Office box.”
The other four board members, Andrew Heller, Bruce Reddock, Mary Jo Sheridan and Carol Migliorino, each looked at the anonymous complaint during the meeting. The board did not publicly divulge the nature of the complaint.
The new ethics code, enacted in January, dictates that complaints must be signed, notarized and mailed to the ethics board at a Post Office box.
Sheridan said the city needs a policy for handling ethics board mail that may come into City Hall, even after the board has its own Post Office box. This mail should be date-stamped, logged and initialed by whoever processes it.
“No one except a member of the ethics board staff should be opening our correspondence,” Hodowanitz said.
Sheridan asked, “Do we know who opened it?”
Hodowanitz replied no; the Law Department said the letter was opened when received there and they don’t know who opened it.
Hodowanitz said she got the letter after the board’s second meeting on Oct. 24. Before that, the anonymous complaint was “floating around City Hall, and I don’t like that,” she said.
The board agreed to ask Mayor Wayne Evans to instruct staff that any correspondence coming into City Hall addressed to the ethics board must go into an internal board mailbox and not be opened by anyone else.
“Our official business should not even be coming to this building, let alone being opened,” Hodowanitz said.
In other matters, the board agreed on the following:
- To submit to the administration a budget request of $62,365 for 2020. The largest components include $30,000 for a solicitor, $16,250 for an investigative officer and $12,000 for a secretary.
- To urge the administration to expedite efforts for the board to retain a solicitor. The board is at the mercy of an administration that has not yet issued a public notice request for proposals for legal services because it’s busy with “higher priorities,” Hodowantiz said. As they did at their first two meetings, members raised numerous issues requiring advice and direction from a solicitor. “A solicitor is absolutely necessary for us,” Reddock said.
- To ask the administration for office space and a landing page on the city website, as well as for all employee statements of financial interest (SFI) filed in 2018, a list of any SFIs not filed, and the city’s plan going forward for posting SFIs online.
The board scheduled its next meeting for Dec. 12 at 5 p.m. at City Hall.
Contact the writer: jlockwood@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9100 x5185; @jlockwoodTT on Twitter