The city’s Office of Ethics and Transparency may be hamstrung by the new city budget, according to a member of the commission that advises the office.
At a City Council meeting on Aug. 5, Ethics Commission Chair Barbara Pollack warned the council of the change and its potential effects on some of their work.
Long Beach’s proposed 2026 budget shifts away two-thirds of the working hours of an assistant to the city manager from the ethics office to preparations for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
With the city’s Office of Ethics and Transparency already small, that amounts to a 35% cut in staff, Pollack said. The office is currently staffed by two people — Assistant to the City Manager Jorge Godinez and the City Ethics Officer Heather Van Wijk. It also has two others who fulfill public records requests.
Pollack’s comments follow a letter she sent in April, warning that the move will leave the office undermanned as it carries out a five-year plan on properly training city employees in ethical conduct.
These trainings, Pollack said, are on “ethical decision-making,” which spans topics like campaign finance, lobbying and conflicts of interest.
“Gifts and gratuities policy, people need to understand the gifts and gratuities, people need to understand when they’re being lobbied, people need to understand if they’ve got a conflict of interest,” Pollack said, adding that trainings “will suffer” as a result of the proposed change.
The commission now oversees an online education portal and an ethics helpline that they say has grown in the past year.
“That helpline needs to be staffed, and the staff need to be able to give substantive answers, to help people comply with their ethics responsibilities,” Pollack said. “You know, if you’ve got one and a third people, how are you going to move forward?”
“If the training programs fall flat, employees are going to lose the forward momentum,” Pollack said.
This comes as commissioners requested additional money to pay for employee training, as well as another full-time ethics officer, citing an in-house study that found Long Beach has far fewer staff devoted to ethics training than comparable cities.
While new to the city — it’s been around only a handful of years — the ethics office has pushed heavily for the Ethics and Good Governance Act, a substantial rewrite of the city ethics provisions of the municipal code that calls for more rules around lobbying public officials.
According to Pollack, the proposal last went from the City Council to the City Manager’s office in June.
As of Friday, the ethics commission has not received any formal response from the City Council. Without the purview to know — the commission’s role is solely advisory — Pollack and others have no inkling as to whether their request will be honored.
“The city (has) worked very hard to build a workforce that serves the city with integrity and to gain the trust of residents and the business community in Long Beach,” Pollack said. “This is not the time for Long Beach’s ethics program to stumble.”