So I’m hearing though the grapevine that the head of a city-government department in Waynesboro is thinking about running for City Council next year, and that he’s not necessarily thinking about quitting his day job before doing it.
“Can’t be,” I remember saying when I first was made aware of this tidbit of information. “There has to be something prohibiting that in the city charter or the State Code. I mean, hello, conflict of interest?”
You might remember that I ran for City Council in Waynesboro last year, and that my opponents raised the conflict-of-interest issue with me, and though their contention was a fundamental misunderstanding of what conflict of interest is – and no, editing a magazine and news website does not bring into play any conflicts of interest, any more than an attorney or insurance agent or any other small-business owner interested in serving in city government would have a conflict of interest – I still hear from people today who were convinced it would have been an issue for me to have to wade through, I guess believing that I might be tempted to use my position to influence news stories and scoop the competition when something big was about to come down.
Funny how it wasn’t the local newspapers raising issue with this. They’d seem to have had the most to lose should I have been elected. But I digress.
Back to the situation at hand in the here and now, regarding the department head thinking about running in the May 2010 elections. I’ve confirmed with the interested party that he’s “exploring” a run, but that’s it at this point, and since he asked me nicely if I’d hold off on writing specifically about what he might or might not be thinking about doing in the political world, I’m not going to share his identity with you here, except that it’s a he and that he heads a city department.
More important to my intellectual interest here is a bit of “exploring” on my own part – as in, Can the guy really run for City Council and still work for city government? I started on this by doing some research on the Internet, poring through the State Code and city charter and the Virginia Attorney General’s website line by line to try to get a feel for the applicable laws and legal opinions.
My read of those sources left me with the impression that there was nothing in the State Code barring a local-government employee from running for office, and that while some cities and towns have a direct prohibition spelled out in their charters, it didn’t come across to me at my glance at the Waynesboro city charter that such was the case here.
City attorney Todd Patrick confirmed that for me. “Nothing in the charter prohibits a current employee from running, and nothing in the State Code prohibits a current employee from running,” said Patrick, who I should make clear is not the person mulling over a run at a City Council seat next year.
The rest of the story from Patrick: “There are certain conflicts of interest that you may have to look at and deal with, more in terms of budgets and that kind of thing. But nothing would prohibit an employee from running for office,” he said.
Considering that budgeting is perhaps the most important job for City Council, both setting spending policy for the annual budget and planning for future capital considerations, that could be a bit of a hindrance for a candidate from inside the City Hall structure to have to overcome with voters.
But more on that later. Maybe. Depends on how the rest of the “exploring” goes from here.
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Chris Graham
