Actually it was thrown out because the ethics board and the city attorney that advises them are appointed by the mayor, but why get into semantics?
Since I was the closest thing to a journalist covering this meeting (maybe some AL person was in a closet), here is my rendition of events (hopefully Mr. Danielson will chime in).
It all occurred today at the old city council chambers at city hall at 4 PM. Basically, Mr. Danielson filed an ethics complaint a few days ago that the mayor was in violation for using the State of the City address as a campaign stump speech.
The meeting started with a decision whether or not to have the meeting in open or in executive session. I will commend the Ethics Board for their ONLY good decision today, they decided to leave it in the open (probably since there was no media there).
Reasons they considered throwing out the complaint;
• Danielson filed the complaint one minute after the address started.
• Other mayors have had the address before an election (Munson) which inferred precedent.
• It is against ordinance to submit a press release to the media about an ethics complaint you have filed.
While the ethics commission mulled over all of the reasons, they ultimately threw out the complaint because of #1. Which is bogus, because part of the reason the complaint was issued was because of the timing of the address (which we will get into) not just the content (which we predicted would be a stump political speech, and it was).
Bruce made his case as to why this was a political speech, and not an address. The commission tried to defend the timing of the address, and said past mayors have done the same thing before an election (Munson) but this was not about Munson. While this discussion was going on, I pulled those minutes that were provided to the public before the meeting started. I noticed that in the first 3 years of Huether’s reign that he did his addresses in mid April and May, not in March, I quickly walked up to Bruce and handed him the evidence.
The commission didn’t have much to say about this except that the Mayor has full discretion as to when he wants to make the address.
Then we went into the Power Point presentation that the mayor used during his address. A city employee witness testified that it was common to use a PP during one of these addresses, and he was correct. Then the commission argued that nothing in the address was anymore then typical ‘happenings’ in the city. One of the members (Gregory LaFollette) even said that anything elected officials do is political (I guess he doesn’t understand the difference between ‘political’ and ‘campaigning’).
At this point, a motion had already been made, and Bruce’s testimony was over, so I asked Bruce to request public testimony. They approved his request.
I approached the bench and informed the commission that an address by either a mayor, governor or president not only talks about achievements but states where we can improve. I said besides road construction nothing in the PP presentation talked about improvements in our community (I referenced crime, hungry school kids and low wages). I told them it was a blatant ‘Stump Speech’ specifically timed before an election because of the lack of mentioning ‘improvements’ to our community and the several slides that included the mayor’s rosy opinions about this town.
They had no choice but to throw out the complaint based on the timing of Bruce’s complaint (which as I said above, really doesn’t matter, because the timing of the Mayor’s address is the real reason for the complaint, not just the content).
It ended as I suspected. And I laughed. Another predictable day in SF city politics.