This is the first of two articles reporting the contents of the Tompkins County Ethics Advisory Board’s opinion released on Monday, responding to an ethics complaint filed by Alderperson Cynthia Brock. This report focuses on where the board’s opinion relates to former Ithaca Mayor Svante Myrick.
ITHACA, N.Y.—It’s been almost a year since the Tompkins County Ethics Advisory Board (TCEAB) first began an investigation in response to a wide-ranging ethics complaint submitted by Alderperson Cynthia Brock.
And on Monday, the TCEAB released its advisory opinion: a 49-page document detailing the board’s findings and determinations. In total, the TCEAB agreed on two separate violations, and four appearances of a violation which concern former Mayor Svante Myrick, who voluntarily participated in the investigation but has criticized its legitimacy. The board did ultimately determine, though, that none of the violations seemed intentional.
The violations and appearances of violations that the five-member TCEAB assigned to Myrick concern the lines he was toeing while serving as an employee of People For the American Way (PFAW), and Mayor for the City of Ithaca. Myrick resigned in February 2022 from the Mayor’s office in the middle of a four year term to step into the role of Executive Director at PFAW, a progressive advocacy group which he had worked with since 2017.
While Myrick was in office, parallels would emerge between the public safety policies that he was advocating for locally, and those that PFAW was advocating for. Organizers employed by the organization also began to appear in the city under the campaign name, Ithacans For Reimagining Public Safety. In her complaint, Brock raised concerns around those developments, and the procedures followed in the City of Ithaca’s landmark law enforcement reform effort, Reimagining Public Safety (RPS), as well as the potential for third party influence on the process and for conflicts of interest to have unduly manipulated the direction of the plan which was aimed at addressing racial inequities in local law enforcement, and improving its relationship with the local community, particularly the communities of color.
The complaint would ask the TCEAB to look into a wide range of questions related to events that played out over the course of more than a year: from the the point when the City of Ithaca and Tompkins County retained the nonprofit research center, the Center for Policing Equity in the Fall of 2020, through the work of a closed-doors working group formed by the city to flesh out a now-replaced plan to restructure the Ithaca Police Department, and up until just after former Mayor Myrick left office in February 2022.
The TCEAB’s opinion comes out about four months after the City of Ithaca released a report detailing the findings of an internal investigation into the potential of ethics violations and third party influence related to Ithaca’s Reimagining Public Safety process. The investigation cost the City of Ithaca about $70,000 and was conducted by Kristen Smith, an attorney with the law firm Bond, Schoeneck & King and former Corporation Counsel for the City of Syracuse. Smith’s report, released in Dec. 2022, cleared Myrick and any city officials of any ethics violations, although Smith went into detail around areas where the transparency of the RPS could have been improved.
The TCEAB found no violations of the City Code of Ethics by Eric Rosario and Karen Yearwood, the co-leads of the working group that developed the plan to restructure the Ithaca Police Department, nor any violations made by any of those working group’s members. No violations were made by the Park Foundation, the Center for Transformative Action, and the Dorothy Cotton Institute in the TCEAB’s determination.
All of these organizations were connected to the distribution of funds to working group members and the co-leads of the group to compensate their volunteer work. Many of those community members were were people of color. Police officers that were in the working group were paid overtime for their involvement, and Common Council members are given a stipend for their work in the city. The intent of these payments was to compensate working group members in the name of equity, but the payments were not disclosed to Common Council and the surprise of the payment plan would prompt Brock to request that the process and conduct surrounding the payments be investigated for the potential influence it may have resulted in.
While the above-mentioned conclusions mirror Smith’s report, the TCEAB’s, interpreting many of the same facts and information as Smith, would also arrive at differing conclusions.The TCEAB would attribute two concrete ethics violations to Myrick. One for “receiving direct and indirect benefits from an organization with interests in city government,” and another for failing to disclose the conflicts of interest associated with PFAW.
The board also listed four appearances of violations that it attributed to Myrick. The TCEAB acknowledged that these are determinations that lack the direct evidence needed to confirm them as actual ethics violations but, under New York State ethics laws, the board is tasked with looking for actual ethics violations and the appearance of them.
Among the appearance of violations, the TCEAB determined that Myrick seemed to use his position as Mayor to advance his career with a third party, PFAW, and that “his ability to make impartial judgements solely in the public interest of the city” was compromised by “dual loyalties” to PFAW and the city.
All of these violations and appearances of violations, however, come with a couple of asterisks. In their opinion, the TCEAB wrote that “to the extent that ethical lapses have been identified, there is no evidence before the TCEAB that any of those actions were intentional.” The TCEAB’s report states in a footnote that Myrick “did not operate in a vacuum. There appears to have been a broad lack of visibility into and oversight of [Myrick’s] activities by the Common Council.”
The board wrote that a “more inquisitive Common Council” could have prevented “some, if not all of [the] violations” that the TCEAB identified.
The TCEAB also acknowledges in their opinion that their investigation is less comprehensive than they would like, but blame that on what they deemed as limited participation from officials in the City of Ithaca. During the board’s investigation, City Attorney Ari Lavine would take the stance that the TCEAB was beyond its authority, resulting in a months long gridlock that saw Lavine and the TCEAB’s legal counsel exchange letters presenting arguments over the authority vested in the TCEAB to conduct its investigation.
The TCEAB has maintained that they have not received a satisfactory argument for the position that Lavine staked out, but refrained from using their subpoena power to compel city officials to speak to them. Members of the TCEAB felt doing so would have increased the cost of the investigation, the timeline for it, as well as potentially created further tension between the county and Ithaca’s city government.
In remarks shared during the meeting in which the TCEAB voted to release their opinion, board member Brian Eden said that the TCEAB chose not to pursue the use of subpoena power out of a commitment to maintain “a policy of comity” with the city of Ithaca and the county. “Therefore, we ruled out litigation and the use of subpoena power to compel cooperation. The decision most likely reduced the adversarial nature of the proceeding, but also ensured that our final finding would be less than fully comprehensive.”
While the stalemate between the City of Ithaca and the TCEAB played out, the city saw an investigation that it had commissioned conclude. In a joint statement from Lavine and Ithaca Mayor Laura Lewis released after the TCEAB published their opinion on Monday, both emphasized Smith’s conclusion that there were no ethics violations, and doubled down on the argument that the TCEAB was beyond its “lawful advisory scope.”
Smith had determined that Myrick’s expressed alignment between the policies he was pushing for as Mayor, and those that his employer, PFAW, were advocating for freed him of any conflict of interest, unless he were to be paid or personally benefit from the policy stance he took as Mayor.
In its opinion, the TCEAB wrote that Myrick stated that PFAW had been trying to recruit him as their Executive Director for years, but the board concluded that his promotion to the position and his subsequent promotion to President of the organization constitute a personal benefit drawn from his work as Ithaca’s Mayor.
Explaining their determination that an alignment of policy positions was an insufficient reason to rule out a conflict of interest, the TCEAB wrote that “even if firewalls were somehow in place, the difficulty for the public arises in determining whether Mr. Myrick was asserting these policy positions and acting in his capacity as Mayor, or as a paid employee of an external advocacy and lobbying organization. Based upon the evidence before us, we cannot determine which entity he represented. It is insufficient to claim that general alignment alleviates the issue.”
In the view of the TCEAB, Myrick’s ability to remain independent in his decision making was brought into question. While Mayor of Ithaca, Myrick was lobbying for support of the city’s Reimagining Public Safety plan in his capacity as an employee at PFAW, and also fundraising for PFAW.
The efforts to bring organizers from PFAW into the city of Ithaca predates Myrick’s January 2022 announcement that he would be leaving his role as Mayor. The TCEAB cite a October 2021 Linkedin post from Alana Bird, an employee of PFAW, in which she announces stepping into the position of Campaign Manager of Ithacans for Reimagining Public Safety.
The TCEAB’s opinion reads that “even if unlikely in this case, it is difficult to imagine Mr. Myrick being able to go back to PFAW and renounce or modify his stance or positions. Independence is an essential function which cannot exist in the face of these payments. More critically, payment or tangible benefits from outside organizations, advocacy groups and lobbyists erode public confidence and trust in legislation, policy and other governmental actions.”
In a written statement he released, Myrick emphasized that the investigation that the City of Ithaca paid Smith to conduct did not result in any ethics violations being found. Myrick has taken to criticizing the TCEAB’s investigation as well, arguing that its chair, Tompkins County Legislator Rich John, is caught in his own conflict of interest. It came forward that John had offered edits to an April 2022 op-ed that Brock had written which predated her submitting her ethics complaint to be the TCEAB, but contained many of the same themes.
John says he never had knowledge that Brock was planning to submit an ethics complaint. Brock, likewise, says that she had not planned to submit an ethics complaint until after the op-ed had been published. The idea of the ethics complaint she wrote came together after she received additional information from Ithaca’s current Mayor after the publication of the op-ed that substantiated many of her concerns, says Brock. The Ithaca Voice reviewed that email correspondence, provided by Brock to corroborate that series of events.
The accusations of a conflict of interest ultimately led John to decide to abstain from voting on the approval of the TCEAB’s opinion on Monday. His stated reasoning was not because he felt it was improper for him to vote on the matter, but to demonstrate that the unanimous support from the four other members of the TCEAB, which are volunteers.
In his statement, Myrick interpreted John’s decision as an acknowledgement of a conflict of interest. “The belated decision by the county board chair to acknowledge his conflicts of interest and abstain from a final vote on the findings is a serious concern, given his role in driving the investigation,” wrote Myrick.
John has responded to Myrick’s accusations that he was unfit to serve as chair, citing that New York State law requires a county legislator to sit on the the county’s Ethics Advisory Board, and that the TCEAB is legally required to take up ethics complaints that are deemed to bear merit — a point which John has stressed throughout the process. The county’s ethics advisory board was also made to take up the investigation since there is no city ethics advisory board. The TCEAB recommended that the city form one in its opinion.
The four other members of the TCEAB, and the board’s legal counsel, did not find a conflict of interest in John continuing to work in the investigation.
During the TCEAB’s investigation, Myrick also made an allegation that John had separate political motivations for taking up the investigation that Brock prompted with her complaint. Myrick alleged that John had asked him, while Mayor, to “evict” residents of the informal homeless encampments in the south western part of the City of Ithaca, known as the “Jungle.”
At the time the allegation was reported in January 2023, John did not respond to The Ithaca Voice’s request for a response to it. But in an interview on Tuesday he did, calling the statement Myrick attributed to him a “complete fabrication.”
John explained that his decision to not respond was to avoid distracting from the work that the TCEAB was doing. “My bigger concern was this has nothing to do with the work that the Ethics Advisory Board was doing, and I did not want to contribute to a sideshow.”
He reflected that, “maybe I should have spoken about it at the time, but I sucked it up because we were trying to do our work and inflaming this in the press was not the right thing to do.”
It’s unclear if the TCEAB’s opinion and recommendations will be embraced by officials in city hall, but Brock said in an interview with The Ithaca Voice that she is hoping for an open conversation to begin based on the findings of Smith’s report as well as the TCEAB’s opinion.
She also took issue with the TCEAB’s framing that a more inquisitive Common Council could have prevented the violations that did occur, saying that city staff should also be accountable. “We as council members and the community look to our elected officials and, frankly, senior staff in both city and county to ensure that our policies are followed,” said Brock.
“I do think that to a certain extent we were waiting for — at least I was waiting for — [the TCEAB’s] report to come out. And I think now that we have both reports, we have the ability to have a real open conversation and find a way forward,” said Brock.
In their advisory opinion, the board states that “no inferences should be drawn […] on the substances of the RPS proposal,” and in concluding their report, the TCEAB wrote wrote that “in all events reimagining our public safety for the benefit of all must continue, including the broad public discussion necessary to that project. It is intended that this Advisory Opinion assist in the path going forward.”