Moonlighting

Everybody else has to fess up on the moolah. Why don't Boston's city councilors?

by Yvonne Abraham

The year was 1947. The legendary James Michael Curley, serving his fourth term as mayor in four decades, had been carted off to prison. Again. Curley was no stranger to Danbury, having paid a 60-day visit back in 1903 for taking a civil-service exam for a friend. This time, by many accounts, the charges (mail fraud) were trumped up, and the mayor was eventually pardoned by President Truman. But while there may not have been fire this time, plenty of smoke billowed around Curley's administrations. He had risen to City Hall through Boston's patronage-driven political machinery, and as mayor, he concentrated its capricious workings in his own office. As mayor, Curley would be the one to dispense the jobs and the favors and the special treatment to those who pleased him.

And Curley wasn't the only one with ethical problems. When he went back to Danbury in 1947, he was not replaced by the president of the city council, John B. Kelly, as he should have been, but by city clerk John B. Hynes. Kelly had been indicted for taking bribes from companies seeking garbage permits.

These are clearly more honest -- and more boring -- times in Boston City Hall (although other cities, like Chicago, have managed to keep the tradition of graft and corruption as strong as ever in recent years). It's hard to imagine our teetotaling, super-cautious, image-conscious mayor, Thomas Menino, trucking in the kind of borderline (and full-fledged) corruption that defined Curley's City Hall.

And that's likely true of the 13 elected city councilors as well (see "Who Earns What?", right). But then again, we have no way of knowing for sure. State law subjects most major politicians to minute scrutiny in the interests of keeping them honest, but Boston's city councilors are exempt. Sure, they have to file campaign-finance reports. But they don't have to tell anybody anything about their personal finances: where they get their money from, what kinds of assets they own, what they owe and to whom -- all the kinds of things that can often tell the public a great deal about a politician and that, when publicly disclosed, can make an elected official think twice about, say, accepting a break on a mortgage from a friendly bank manager in his district.

Who earns what? Unlike elected state officials and many city employees, city councilors are not required to file annual financial-disclosure forms -- a list of all their assets, debts, and sources of income. To their credit, some Boston city councilors told us about their finances anyway. Council president James Kelly and at-large councilors Mickey Roache, Steve Murphy, and Albert "Dapper" O'Neil say they have no other income sources besides their $62,500 annual council salaries, and no assets other than the houses in which they live. Ditto councilors Maureen Feeney, Maura Hennigan, and Gareth Saunders. Councilor Charles Yancey has lectured at Bunker Hill Community College in recent years, but not this year, since he's running for the Eighth Congressional District seat. He says he received honorariums of $700 each year from the college but that he made no profit because he paid for his students' books out of his own pocket. At-large councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen does occasional legal work that she says brings in a couple of hundred dollars a month, in addition to the $10,000 she makes from a rental property in Southie. Brian Honan, also a lawyer, says he has recently started writing briefs for the firm of Salon and Associates, for which he averages $175 weekly for two to ten hours' work. "I do as much as I can at home or on weekends," says Honan. Councilor Paul Scapicchio does legal work for Brown, Rudnick, Freed and Gesmer, but he says he's rarely there -- "I check in and say hi and sit in a seminar." And although Scapicchio says he would support a law requiring him to disclose his payments from Brown, Rudnick, he declines to do so. "Since there isn't a law, I won't tell you," he says. "But I can tell you that if you combine my salary at City Hall and the money I make from the firm, I am still paid far less than I would be had I stayed at the firm." Dan Conley still maintains an office and an assistant at the legal firm of Boyle and Morrissey and estimates that he works there about 10 hours a week "on my own time. The law is my vocation," he says. But he won't go any further than that: "How much I earn there is my business," he says. If the councilors' estimates of their supplementary income is correct, Tom Keane earned the most outside income last year: more than $33,000 from consulting work he does for a New York City acquisition firm called Murphy and Partners, in which he has a 5 percent interest. The company invests in radio stations, TV productions, and a chain of newspapers. He says he spends one day every two weeks in Manhattan for the company and has insisted that Murphy and Partners does no deals at all in Massachusetts to avoid possible conflicts of interest. In 1996, Keane made out even better, earning $80,000 in outside income from two companies in which he held partial ownership.

Every elected state official in Massachusetts has to disclose personal finances. So does Menino. So do many city appointees and employees. An anonymous, powerless policy wonk tucked deep in the bowels of the city's retirement board has to state publicly every year what she makes teaching at the local community college, how much interest she pays on her mortgage, and what stocks she holds. But Boston city councilors -- elected officials in one of the country's major cities, in whom the voting public has placed its trust -- can keep their personal finances entirely to themselves.

"How much I earn," says one councilor, "is my business."

There's no special reason to think the members of this city council are more prone to conflicts of interest, or less likely to be upstanding, than other elected officials. But we live in a time when we can -- and should -- expect solid evidence.

"This is the modern age," says former city councilor Richard Iannella. "People want to know their elected officials are being trustworthy and honest."

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They may be less powerful than they once were, but Boston city councilors are still the average Joe's first point of contact with government. They're the officials folks go to if they need some strings pulled or some grease for the bureaucratic machinery. If you want someone to argue your case before the licensing board, or to persuade the city to give your construction plans a closer or quicker look, or to fight for funds to fix your kids' playground, or to find your son Jimmy a summer job with the city's cleanup corps, the councilor is your man or woman. These people may not be shaping huge swaths of the city, but they still affect a lot of lives.

Though one or two of them are frequently missing in action, most city councilors are very busy people. The city gives each of them $110,000 every year for staff to help out with constituent services, but they can only help so many people. Choices must be made. The best results go to the most persistent callers, those who've helped out on campaigns or crusades, and the people the councilors know or have met. On such a basis are the lives of all the city's residents affected.

Although the council is by all accounts much more honest than it used to be, traces of the old culture remain. Take the recent revelation that $300-a-week jobs in the city's cleanup corps were being distributed by city councilors at their absolute discretion, often to the children of people who'd helped them get elected. And though some of the cleanup jobs were, amazingly, meant to work that way, the vast majority are supposed to be awarded without fear or favor on a first-come, first-served basis.

But they haven't been. That's because councilors, just like other politicians, have incentives to help some people more than others. And, also like other politicians, they may well come by those incentives via their own business interests or outside sources of income. For example, if a local bank gives a councilor a good interest rate on a home mortgage, the official may want to help that bank with a zoning issue.

That's not to say city councilors are necessarily corrupt or that their legislative actions will necessarily be influenced by their own financial interests, but they're no less prone to that kind of thing than other politicians are, either. And until they're compelled to disclose those interests publicly, we can't really know what their temptations might be.

City councilor Charles Yancey has tried repeatedly to introduce a bill requiring financial disclosure for his colleagues. "I submitted it five times, and it was defeated five times," Yancey says. "Anyone who's in a position to decide how public dollars are spent should be required to disclose, not just to help keep people honest, but to show the public everything is being done on a very fair basis."

In late 1996, just before Richard Iannella left the city council to become Suffolk County's register of probate, he also filed legislation to compel councilors to disclose other sources of income. He says other councilors opposed it, and it died in committee.

"They'd say, `Why is this anyone's business?' " says Iannella, still smarting from the loss. "Well, what if the bank decides to give you a 3-percent-interest loan, and the average Joe is getting 7 percent?" (Several former councilors who served during the '80s, including the mayor, recall having filed financial-disclosure forms voluntarily, but since they were never legally required to do so, that practice disappeared.)

Other cities certainly require disclosure. In Seattle, for example, all elected officials -- including city councilors, who earn $73,000 a year -- submit yearly reports on income and interests. As do city officials in Portland, Oregon, who make $70,000 and are not allowed to hold second jobs.

Even in Boston, councilors are now the only people in City Hall earning more than $50,000 (they recently raised their own salaries from $54,500 to $62,500 per year) who don't have to file annual financial-disclosure forms. In 1995, Mayor Menino enacted an executive order requiring all city appointees who make policy or budget decisions, all city workers who earn more than $50,000, and all Boston Redevelopment Authority and Boston Housing Authority officials to disclose what properties they own, what kinds of investments they hold, how much money they earn from other sources, and how much money they owe and on what terms. And they have to include the same information for their spouses.

"I introduced it because I wanted to let city employees know that more would be expected of them," says Menino. "I wanted them to show they have no financial interest in the decisions they're making. That's always a question in this business."

And city councilors can have far more impact on city affairs than can a low-level manager at the BRA, for example, or the arts commissioner. They approve and can reduce the city's $1.5 billion budget, and they can hold it up for weeks on end, as they did last year, to extract indulgences from the mayor for their own constituents. They gave final approval to the controversial merger of Boston City Hospital and Boston University Medical Center in 1996. And they'll be the ones to decide whether the Quinn Bill, raising some police officers' salaries by 25 percent, goes into effect. Sure, Menino can overrule them as much as he likes, but a mayor with his carefully guarded good-guy image wouldn't dare do it too often.

So why don't they have to tell the public who they're beholden to, or what they're really doing with their time? Popular councilor-at-large Albert "Dapper" O'Neil, who says he has no outside income, has been jumping up and down about this for years (although he's doing less jumping these days), shouting "I'm a full-time councilor and they're not" to anyone who will listen. "They're making money when they should be in City Hall," says O'Neil. "I want to see how much they're making on the side. You either put your two full years in on that [city council] job, or you don't take it in the first place!"

To all appearances, the current city councilors are not quite the chronic moonlighters O'Neil seems to think they are, but several of them do supplement their salaries with income from other sources. Councilors Peggy Davis-Mullen, Brian Honan, Paul Scapicchio, and Dan Conley are all lawyers, and they all practice to varying degrees in addition to their city council jobs. Tom Keane has an interest in a New York City acquisition firm, for which he is also a consultant.

Keane maintains that his firm does no deals at all in Massachusetts, and Scapicchio says none of the briefs he works on concern city matters. Those who do have outside sources of income say that their work does not conflict with their duties as councilors, that it compromises neither their commitment to the council nor the interests of the city. But because they have no legal requirement to disclose the details of their extra income, or even to admit to said income at all, there's no way to get independent confirmation of that, no matter how honest they look.

Most of the councilors -- Mickey Roache, Gareth Saunders, Honan, Scapicchio, Keane, Yancey, O'Neil, Maura Hennigan, and Maureen Feeney -- say they would support a financial-disclosure requirement. Feeney has hesitations, though: "Being in public life is hard enough," she says. "If the law requires [disclosure], I'd be happy to comply, but it's one more reason for someone to look at running for public office and say, `I can't be bothered.' " And Honan objects to the idea of requiring spouses to file.

Other councilors are opposed to disclosure in principle. "Nobody has ever given me a reason why it should be anyone's business what my mortgage is and what my outstanding loans are," says council president James Kelly. "Other than that the information might satisfy some busybodies." Kelly (who says he has no outside income) argues that conflicts of interest are hardly relevant on the municipal level, where so little money is involved compared to the federal level, and that city politicians' campaign-finance reports should be enough.

Campaign-finance reports can, indeed, reveal much about the candidates -- whether their electoral ambitions are buttressed by lawyers or unions or Auntie Thelmas, whether they spend most of their resources on TV time or shell out for millions of fliers, whether they spring for volunteer dinners at Houlihan's or Biba, whether they really have the support they say they do.

But campaign-finance reports do not tell us enough about the politicians themselves -- whether an anti-rent control crusader is raking in tens of thousands from his or her own tenants, whether a councilor who voted for the hospital merger has a spouse who was employed by either institution, whether the pol who professes to know how the little people feel owns fancy properties or holds shares in a firm that specializes in leveraged buyouts.

Dan Conley, though, isn't buying any of this disclosure stuff. "It's almost like voyeurism," he says. "My obligation is to conduct myself ethically, and as long as I'm not using my office to unfair advantage I'm doing nothing wrong. How much I have -- whose business is that but my own?" The councilor does not allow that there should be a check on possible conflicts of interest. "I'd be happy to file an affidavit under pains and penalties of perjury that says my financial situation has not presented any conflict of interest," he says.

That wins this week's circular-logic award. Most elected officials swear in their oaths of office that they won't open their positions to conflicts of interest, but politicians still get indicted. And while there's no way to ensure that councilors won't mislead on their financial-disclosure forms, in this cynical age filling them out demonstrates a good faith that would be harder to locate in a blanket assertion of purity, sworn though it might be.

At-large councilor Stephen Murphy takes a novel view: disclosure laws for city councilors are irrelevant because councilors have little power. "We don't really have any major bills," he says. "Anything major is done through the legislature. And we already have rules on the council to say you cannot vote on a matter if someone in your family has a financial interest."

It's a remarkable view for somebody to take of his own office, and one that certainly seems to call into question why councilors deserve to be paid so much. The fact is, councilors can have as much impact on the lives of residents as state legislators do. What they lack in authority, they make up for in proximity to people's everyday lives. They're among the primary deliverers of the constituent services -- the streetlights, the community centers, the tot lots -- that people really care about. If councilors' own financial interests are leading them to decide whose causes they champion, that's as much a conflict of interest as if they or their spouses were taking paychecks from the police department during debate over the new Boston Police Patrolmen's Association labor contract.

And the public has a right to know whether that's a danger. As long as there are boards of appeal, bank managers who know the worth of having a city councilor on their side, and competing demands on councilors, there is the possibility of conflicts of interest, regardless of how spotless this particular city council may be. Richard Iannella finds cause for suspicion in the very fact that some councilors oppose the idea of disclosure.

"My question," he says, "is what do people have to hide?"

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.