Milhaven: Banning anonymous political personal gifts is necessary, swift action

Anonymous personal gifts to elected officials are being confused with legal campaign contributions.

Bob Littlefield, and his political allies Betty Janik and Tom Durham, are fueling confusion and providing misinformation to divert attention from Bob’s role in a recent ethics complaint.

In addition, Littlefield is trying to turn a political liability into a political asset. They do not have the support of the business community. Littlefield has long bemoaned his inability to raise money to support his campaign.

By conflating gifts with campaign contributions, they deflect attention from Littlefield’s own unethical behavior, “refuse” contributions they wouldn’t have gotten anyway and attempt to undermine his business friendly opponents.

In an ethic’s complaint and investigation, it was revealed that Bob Littlefield advised that personal gifts and donations to an elected official should be kept anonymous. Now, Bob and his allies would like you to believe that the issue is about campaign contributions.

Last month, your City Council directed the city attorney to propose modifications to the city’s ethics code to specifically prohibit anonymous gifts to councilmembers. These changes were prompted by the judges’ findings in a recent ethics complaint that anonymous gifts were not specifically prohibited.

We will review the city attorney’s changes on Tuesday night.

While I believe we need a more thorough and comprehensive review of our ethics policies, I also believe that we need to move quickly to close this loophole and ban anonymous personal gifts.

To my great astonishment, we have gotten emails, mostly from Littlefield supporters, encouraging us to vote no on the proposed changes.

Personal gifts have been confused with campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are a completely separate issue and have never been part of the city’s ethics code. State and federal statutes outline the rules and processes to enforce campaign finance laws.

The key difference is one of transparency. All campaign contributions are fully disclosed on campaign finance reports that are available for everyone to view on the city’s website. As a voter, you have full information about who contributes how much to candidates and that information may help you make your decisions about who to support.

In terms of the question before us on Tuesday to modify our ethics code, a No vote is equivalent to saying that anonymous personal gifts should be allowed. I support the proposed changes to the ethics code that prohibit anonymous gifts.

I also agree with many who call for a more thorough review of our ethics code. Tuesday night is the first step.

Editor’s Note: Linda Milhaven is an elected member of Scottsdale City Council.