The City Council has approved a seemingly endless string of ethics reforms. None have silenced the steady drumbeat of corruption that has sent a parade of its members to federal prison.
On Monday, another ordinance was added to the pile, this time to remove what Inspector General Deborah Witzburg viewed as roadblocks impeding her internal investigations.
After months of negotiations that continued over the weekend, the Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight approved a watered-down ordinance aimed at removing some of those impediments.
Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry said she accepted an ordinance she adamantly opposed — and condemned as illegal just five months ago — after a series of concessions made by its chief sponsor, Ethics Committee Chair Matt Martin of the 47th Ward.
“It imposed a requirement that were in contravention to an attorney’s license. It removed guardrails around subpoenas. It precluded representation of a city attorney in an interview. We need to have a different product that did not do that,” Richardson-Lowry told the Sun-Times. “We have had … countless meetings to get to a better work product.”
Witzburg said the revised ordinance achieves her two most important goals: protecting the “integrity of investigative interviews” and giving the inspector general “better access to records.”
It allows Witzburg and the city’s Law Department to “go back and forth over privileged questions where they arise” and lets the inspector general “make requests to review certain categories of privileged records.”
And the final version “more clearly defines who can be present in the interview room and when,” she said.
“An individual person being interviewed as the subject of an OIG investigation is absolutely entitled to their own lawyer,” Witzburg said. “This goes some way toward clarifying that to address any fears that people are gonna be railroaded without counsel. That’s certainly not what’s going on here.”
The original proposal would have prohibited the law department from attorney-client privilege or picking and choosing which subpoenas from the inspector general are complied with. There would have been “no room for discretion” concerning inspector general subpoenas, just as there isn’t with subpoenas issued by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
The watered-down version removed the subpoena section entirely.
“This is an effort to reach a compromise, a consensus outcome,” Witzburg said. “Of the three issues that we originally raised, that is the one that we have, so far, been able to work through with the law department under the existing rules. We will continue to try to do that. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be back to say so.”
Martin also agreed to clarify what is or is not deemed as “privileged communication” that would be off limits to the inspector general.
“If there’s pending litigation, if there is a court order or if there’s a federal investigation, the department of law can point to that and say privileged documents cannot be shared because of those considerations,” Martin said.
The new version further clarifies that the Office of Inspector General must “comply with various laws, regulations and policies, and failure to do so can be grounds for removal,” he said.
Even with the concessions made to soften the corporation counsel’s opposition, Martin maintained that the ordinance will make a difference.
“We need to make sure that the inspector general’s office has maximum access to the documents they need to conduct timely, transparent and thorough investigations. This is a big step in that direction,” Martin said. “We need to ensure that potential witnesses don’t feel chilled from providing testimony they need to provide.”
Witzburg has been at loggerheads with the Johnson administration on a wide range of ethics issues — so much so that she is unlikely to be reappointed when her four-year term expires in April.
“You have to be able to do this job like you don’t want it anymore,” she said Monday. “I’m certainly not gonna pull punches to secure reappointment.”
Richardson-Lowry flatly denied Witzburg’s claim that Johnson was standing in the inspector general’s way when her investigations got too close for comfort.
“That’s not how this mayor functions,” she said. “I’ve never seen a mayor do that.”