Pat Dando Week: A Blue Ribbon Councilmember

The City of San Jose regularly reviews its ethics policies for Councilmembers and those interacting with the government. In 2004, the empaneling of the Blue Ribbon Task Force to do the review coincided neatly with the Merc's disembowelment of Terry Gregory.

The panel was a remarkable group: Reed, Chavez, Yeager and, of course, Dando.

The meetings began as a demure affair, in the old building next to the old City Hall. Not much interest, besides a leering and twitchy David Yarnold, Merc editorial page editor. The early meetings offered nothing particularly exciting, and consisted primarily of panels of community leaders. The initial plan was that the Task Force be finished be May.

When May arrived, with the paper full of editorial accusations against Gregory, the panel was already looking at months more of discussion as the lobbyist straw man began to appear. On June 22nd, the initial lobbyist ordinance revision was passed. All agreed that, as the Merc put it, the "generals in the lobbying war" (the heads of the Chamber and Labor) had been tamed, and rightly so.

After the July recess, an ambitious expansion of the work plan was laid out lasting through the end of the year, as the Merc's war drums continued to beat. (Come September, incidentally, McEnery saw his chance to enter the fray, advocating the disbanding of the Task Force and immediate censure of Gregory. Not surprisingly, this very closely toed Yarnold's Merc line.)

In October, the group dealt with the revolving door ordinance, with Dando asking specifically about the statute of limitations. The same month, prompted by the Merc, they looked at officeholder accounts and the possibilities for censure.

On October 28th, the conversation delved into unethical campaigning and hit pieces. Dando asked "if the censure policy could be imposed on candidates for office". As in, could a candidate be publicly reprimanded by the Council before the election for an egregious hit piece. Tom Mertens, then Chair of the Elections Commission, indicated that they'd repeatedly looked at how to stop such campaigning, to no avail. The Elections Commission was asked to look at it again, eventually arriving at the same outcome.

Most of this was lost, however, in the maelstrom of the Gregory situation. It was easy to lose track of these other issues in light of the consistent pressure from inside and out over how best to punish Councilmember Gregory. In fact, by mid-November, the full Council was discussing Terry's fate, and the BRTF died a slow death.

The point of all of this, beyond being an interesting moment in our city's history, is that four people were responsible for establishing the following policies, at a time when almost no one was paying attention to the details:

• what constitutes a lobbyist, what does a lobbyist have to report, and when,
• what timeframe limits are there between leaving office and becoming a lobbyist,
• and, what measures could be implemented to halt negative campaign mail.

Only one of those four, who, incidentally, was termed out at the end of that year, went on to take personal advantage of her knowledge of each issue.

That, of course, was Pat Dando. How that played out over the next two years we will look at at the end of the week. Stay tuned.

See part 1 of Pat Dando Week: A Look Back.