The Richardson City Council recently decided on the City's 2019-2021 Statement of Goals. There's so much to say, this blog post comes in three parts. Part 1 covered the process. Part 2 covered the (in)significant changes from last year. Today, I close with my biggest disappointment.
As I've written before, I wanted the Council to commit to a goal of strengthening our Code of Ethics after former Mayor Laura Maczka's bribery trial revealed how toothless the current one is.
I wanted to see evidence that Council members have given some thought to this, perhaps even that they read my opinion on the matter, which I laid out in an op-ed, "Building Trust", in "Richardson Living" magazine (republished here). I had many suggestions for how to strengthen the Code of Ethics by closing loopholes and making bad behavior harder to conceal. I wasn't expecting a goals-setting meeting to turn into a review of the Code of Ethics, but I did hope that the Council would adopt an explicit goal for the upcoming term of reviewing the existing code with a goal of strengthening it.
Not only can I find no evidence of that in the new Goals statement, but because I wasn't in attendance and there's no video record, I can't even say whether the topic was even discussed. The omission is a big disappointment. The Council may be proud of their handiwork, but in the eyes of this constituent, they were so focused on pruning the existing trees, they missed the forest of good governance.
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