Surfside’s Ethics Laws Are Under Attack. Here’s Why They Matter.

If you’ve been paying attention to Surfside’s politics this month, then you’ve been hearing a lot about Special Meetings—Commission meetings that happen outside of the regularly scheduled time on the second Tuesday night of every month. Mayor Danzinger has convened three Special Meetings in this month alone, and the next one is scheduled for this Thursday, August 27th, at 10:00 a.m. These meetings have been hastily convened—the first two were announced with barely 48 hours’ notice—and the Mayor’s apparent purpose in calling these meetings is to repeal a slew of laws and resolutions with as little public participation, and as little deliberation from the Commission, as possible.

There’s no other way to put it: What’s been going on at these Special Meetings is cause for outrage. None of what we’ve been discussing at these meetings is urgent, and there’s no good reason why all these drastic changes to our Town’s laws couldn’t have been discussed at our regular, monthly meetings—when residents are tuned in, and when Commissioners have ample time to study the agenda packets and to consult with the Town Manager and the Town Attorney before voting. What we’re getting instead is the worst kind of governmental decision-making: rushed, uninformed, and chaotic. Of course, the Mayor has every right to propose legislative changes, and every new Commission has the right to change the law. But these Special Meetings are not the way to do it.

In the past few weeks, former elected officials have been sounding the alarm about the Special Meetings. Former Mayor Mitchell Kinzer, and Commissioners Ruben Coto, Michael Karukin, and Eliana Salzhauer have voiced concerns both about the process by which these legislative changes are happening and also about some of the specific changes being made—especially the new restrictions on residents’ rights to speak at public meetings. But in all the rush and chaos created by these Special Meetings, there’s an important issue that hasn’t been getting nearly enough attention:

Mayor Danzinger is also gutting the Town’s ethics laws, making it easier for himself and for Commissioners to profit from their service on the Commission and to conceal their sources of income from the public.

In the last Commission term, I was proud to sponsor legislation designed to ensure that the members of the Commission were serving the public interest, rather than their own personal, financial interests. The laws we enacted closed loopholes in the state’s financial-reporting requirements, instituting new, Town-level requirements that made financial disclosures more frequent, more comprehensive, and more focused on financial conflicts within the Town of Surfside. We also made it illegal for members of the Commission to profit from their Commission votes for a two-year period following the vote. This last change came after one Commissioner voted to grant a zoning variance to a homeowner and then, a little over a year later, got hired by that same homeowner to demolish the existing structure and build the very same house that received the zoning variance. That move was legal under state law, but I don’t think it should have been, and that’s part of what the new laws sought to change.

At one of the August 6th Special Meetings, the Mayor suggested that the Town’s new ethics laws are unnecessary and that the financial-disclosure form required by the State of Florida (Form 1) is sufficient to produce the information that Surfside residents need to ensure good, honest government. I don’t think that it is. And he suggested that Florida’s and Miami-Dade County’s laws already prohibit self-dealing. I don’t think that those laws go far enough.

The Town’s laws are, by design, stricter than the state law, as you can see from this table:

Question	Surfside law (current)	Florida law (Form 1)
Frequency of reporting	every 6 months	Yearly (In some cases, you can go 21 months without reporting.)
Do you have to specifically identify which sources of income come from within Surfside?	Yes	No
Do you have to report all sources of income from within Surfside?	Yes	No
Which sources of income do you have to report?	All sources within Surfside, regardless of amount. The form reads, “List below every source of income, passive or active, directly or indirectly, from work or services rendered for any person, property or business located in town for the time period between the current and past report.”	Primary sources of income: only those greater than $2,500/year. Secondary sources of income (major clients, customers, etc.): It depends on your share in the business, and also on whether the income from a particular client makes up more than 10% of the business’s income.
Can a member of the Commission profit from a decision made by Commission vote?	Not until two years after the decision.	If the connection, at the time of the vote, is deemed “remote and speculative,” then YES.

What’s even worse about this situation is that Mayor Danzinger and others are not being honest about what’s involved in repealing the new ethics laws. Here’s how Commissioner Weingot described the repeal, in a recent e-mail to constituents: [r]escinding an overly broad and restrictive ethics ordinance and realigning with established Miami-Dade County and State ethics standards and best practices. Commissioner Weingot’s bland, corporate mumbo jumbo covers up what really happened on August 6th: The Commission voted to weaken our ethics laws. I’d encourage residents to ask Commissioner Weingot, How does less frequent and less thorough financial disclosure constitute a “best practice”? How is it a “best practice” to let Commissioners profit from their votes?

At one of the August 6th meetings, the Mayor made two points that I wasn’t given time to respond to, and I’d like to respond to them here. First, he said that the ethics laws were motivated by animosity, and that they personally targeted former Vice Mayor Jeff Rose. That couldn’t be further from the truth. To the contrary, as I tried to explain at that meeting, good-government laws are designed to make politics impersonal and impartial. The restrictions enacted by the former Commission apply equally to all Commissioners, and they allow everyone to see and to know what’s at stake in the Commission’s votes. Mayor Danzinger gets things backward: When you repeal laws like the ones Surfside has—when you say to voters “You don’t need to know; just trust me”—that’s what makes the laws excessively personal.

Second, the Mayor said that the current laws were too vague, and that they might be construed to prohibit realtors from serving on the Commission. If the Mayor thinks the law is vague, or if he wants to talk about creating a carve-out for realtors, then I’d invite the Mayor to join me in a dialogue about how to amend the current law. (We should do that at the next Regular Meeting, though, when the public can comment and everyone has time to study the issue properly.) But repealing the law is the wrong way to go; it’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

And when I see the Commission’s willingness to do just that—to throw out the baby with the bathwater—I can’t help thinking that the goal of this repeal actually is to enable self-dealing. I hope residents will recognize the danger in this repeal, and join me this Thursday in opposing the changes to our Town’s ethics laws.