Ethics 101

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of our complaint driven shutdown we had received a copy of a 'Letter to the Editor' that was being sent to the Osceola News Gazette. It was from a County Commission candidate in District 5, Jonathan Harrell. Our first reaction was to catch ourselves before we fell out of our chairs, because our little un-news blog had received its first communication from a campaign that was not a threat of one kind or another. We have received press releases before, but normally they are from PIO's just trying to spread the good word about their quasi-governmental employers. We hope that other candidates will also begin to include us in their campaign communications realizing the point that we are an un-news site and that we intend to never become a press release distribution service like our other local media outlets. We feel there are already enough of those, but we still welcome the conversation from all of the campaigns.

The topic of the e-mail that we received, which has since been reprinted in the local media, was on ethics reform in local governments. Our first reaction was one of laughter, but as the discussion wore on, changed to a more serious tone. As we look back through many of our own posts, we realized we were talking about ethical issues. Threats from school board members, threats to cut public safety over a tax cut, hand-picked charter review committees designed to further a governmental agenda, shady campaign contributions, and the list goes on. We had to ask ourselves if ethics might not really be the big issue on our local level?

Not long after that our un-news site received approval from blogger.com and we got back to writing, forgetting about the conversations we had in the previous days when we could not post more luring comments from our favorite school board member grabbed our attention. Then, towards the end of the week, the e-mails started pouring in on two issues. One was the resurgence of the 'Preserve' housing project that had found new life because of more lies told to the state to manipulate them into circumventing the will of our local residents. The other was the gift Mayor Swan was trying to bring to the general fund of the City of Kissimmee from the coffers of KUA with out ever discussing the topic with other commissioners. At least as far as we know, there were no discussions between commissioners. Both of these issues are breaches of public trust. Both of these issues require an investigation or audit into possible 'ethics' violations. Our shock over these two incidents set off a flurry of discussion at WayneWho HQ, and then we remembered the letter.

Ethics are that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions. This is a high level concept when you look at our local political playing field, and an idea that is usually buried as a childish understanding of politics. It is often noted between politicians and the special interests groups that control them that those who speak of ethics don't have the experience to get things done for their constituents. Voters are told this same message and that it is who a candidate knows that improves their electability. Maybe ethics and electability should be more closely tied to a candidate than contributions and electability. Our maybe it is just a fools dream to believe our system is capable of operating on this level.

While this is probably not the glowing review the Harrell campaign was hoping for, we would remind all candidates that we do not endorse candidates. We may endorse issues held by candidates, including those who are already sitting in elected positions, but we will leave the endorsement of candidates to the local media and remote bloggers who would rather apply their California values litmus test to qualifying potential candidates. We hope that ethics becomes a discussion topic during this election cycle. We hope that it every candidate will stand up and state their intentions for ethics reform as well as the issue being discussed by the Osceola News Gazette, campaign finance reform. We would also like to challenge all of the candidates to do more than just talk about these issues. Writing a letter is a good start, but we believe that actions speak louder than words. What are you going to do is the question that must be answered next.