HISD Board to consider rolling back ethics rules. Ericka Mellon, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)
The Houston school board on Thursday will consider relaxing its ethics rules three years after tightening policies to curb perceptions that contractors were buying influence.
The proposal would lift a ban on trustees voting on contracts involving donors who contributed at least $500 to their political campaigns in the past year
Of course, the problem here is that the policy flies in the face of HISD's incumbent protection program:
Manuel Rodriguez Jr., the HISD board's first vice president, said Wednesday that he supports changing the policy, especially after coming off a tight re-election campaign late last year. He said some candidates feel handicapped in fundraising under the current rules
Ah, I see. When it comes to re-election some HISD board members have heard passing mention of ethics, and then toss them in the trash when presented with a check. Of course, Rodriguez is in line to become the new board President, which is convenient, since he feels that there's NO WAY someone could "sell their soul for $2,000". A paragon of virtue he is.
That the board is trying to roll these ethics reforms back while there is increased scrutiny on how the District does business as a whole should not go unnoticed. HISD is currently a financial mess ran by bottom-tier trough feeders whose sole purpose in life is not teaching children, but maintaining their place in TheMachine. They are fringe members of the ruling class who apparently simply take the worst of DC Politicians and regurgitate it:
Skillern-Jones, who easily won a runoff in December, said changing the policy was not her idea, but she supported it enough to put it on the agenda. She would not reveal which trustees favored the change.
"I have to read it in depth," Skillern-Jones said Monday.
Trustees were supposed to have a chance to discuss agenda items at a meeting Monday, but Skillern-Jones canceled the session, saying she expected to lose a quorum and noting that two new trustees would take office Thursday. Harris, the board member who had planned to leave, said she agreed to stay, however.
Not only do we have "we have to read the bill to find out what's in the bill" but we also have meetings being cancelled for indeterminate reasons. So we have a bad bill, lack of responsibility surrounding who supports said bill, and dodgy actions leading up to the vote on the bill. It's the triumvirate of suck for local politicians. Skillern-Jones with the rarely seen triple.
Of course, the easy answer would be to encourage people who live in HISD to "vote the bums out" but there are two reasons why that's probably not going to happen. 1. All of this is happening right after an election, so by the time the next one rolls around the news cycle will have churned multiple times and people will have forgotten. 2. Most voters don't pay attention to school district elections.
Since the media doesn't want to put serious resources to investigating the school districts (or any level of local government really) there will be no real focus on the board as they continue to move forward. While this appears that it won't pass, there will be no serious repercussions felt by either Skillern-Jones or Rodriguez to make a future board President shy-away from proposing it again in the future. This is why ethics reform, in all honesty the foxes presiding over the hen-house, is often a political pipe-dream. Even in DC we don't pay enough attention to Congresspersons to prevent them from enriching themselves in ways that would put private business people in jail.
Even more concerning is that HISD currently has people sitting in key positions on the board who consider their personal fund-raising needs to be above good stewardship of taxpayer money. In a representative government with an active citizenry this should result in angry mobs with pitchforks demanding accountability. In today's Houston it's going to result (I'm guessing) in this blog post, a couple of hot-takes on Twitter from some local reporters, and a "we'll see what happens" from the InterLeft.
And all of the players will sit for re-election, or election to higher office, in the next election cycle without a pang of conscience for what they are doing. After all, it's only breaking the rules if you get caught. And to have a pang of conscience you first need to HAVE a conscience.
