This city has a little-known ordinance, requiring council candidates to submit their campaign bank statements on a monthly basis. It’s an important way for the city to monitor the veracity of candidates’ campaign-finance reports.

But if a candidate fails to comply with this ordinance — and a random check by the San Antonio Express-News into 23 current candidates found that only seven have submitted any bank statements to the city — the city takes absolutely no action against them.

This city has a better-known charter provision, requiring council candidates to reside in the district they hope to represent at least six months before filing for office. It’s a requirement that’s fundamental to the integrity of single-district representative government at the municipal level.

But if a candidate fails to comply with this provision — and District 9 candidate Lynlie Wallace has essentially admitted that she not only resides outside the district, but outside the city of San Antonio — the city does nothing to stop them.

When you create rules and do nothing to enforce them, you’re inviting noncompliance. You’re devaluing the very system you’re trying to maintain.

This isn’t a new problem for San Antonio, but it’s a pressing one. There is no single magic-bullet solution, but there are some obvious steps that could move us in the right direction.

For one thing, this city badly needs an ethics auditor who is completely independent of city staff, someone with investigative power, who does not have to answer to the city manager.

That was then-Councilman Carlton Soules’ vision for the office when he worked with then-Mayor Julián Castro in 2012-13 on the creation of the ethics-auditor position. Ultimately, the ethics compliance auditor was set up as a city-staff position, but Soules wants to see a charter amendment that would allow for an auditor who is independent. (District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño has proposed similar reforms.)

“The city has the ability, the authority to enforce its ordinances,” Soules said. “It’s not a procedural issue, it’s a willpower issue. Does the city have the willpower to enforce its own laws, even if it’s politically embarrassing to do so?”

Soules went before the city’s Ethics Review Board on Tuesday, arguing that the current process for handling ethics complaints — which allows the ethics compliance auditor to serve as a filter and decide which complaints even reach the ERB — is compromised from the get-go.

Soules’ ire was based around a decision by Tina Flores, the city’s ethics compliance auditor, to dismiss a complaint filed last December by Peggy Wilson-Schmueckle, a member of the 2017-22 Neighborhood Improvements Bond Committee. Soules responded to that dismissal by filing a complaint of his own against Flores.

Wilson-Schmueckle argued in her complaint that eight members of that committee violated a section of the city’s Ethics Code which prohibits a city official or employee from “taking any official action that he or she knows is likely to affect the economic interests” of that person or an entity with whom they have a business relationship.

The central argument of Wilson-Schmueckle’s complaint was questionable, even if we accept the idea that a bond-committee member is a city official. She interpreted membership on the Hardberger Park Conservancy (which carries no economic benefit) as a conflict of interest when it came to considering funding for a Hardberger Park land bridge.

But Soules’ point about the process is worth considering: Should Flores have blocked the complaint from even reaching the ERB?

Of course, an independent auditor won’t be enough if the ERB doesn’t get more serious about using its powers to take punitive action — as opposed to written reprimands and fiscal slaps on the wrist — on violators.

On the question of candidate residency, once a candidate is on the ballot, the city chooses to stay out of the fray and let district courts sort out these controversies. But the burden shouldn’t be on opposing candidates to go through the expense, and the time-consuming legal process, of proving an obvious case of cheating.

The city could address this problem simply by raising its proof-of-residency threshold when a candidate files for office. At this point, all the city requires is voter-registration information, but the Wallace case has shown how deficient that piece of evidence can be.

Bottom line: If we don’t come out of this election cycle with a serious commitment to enforcing the ethics rules we have, we might as well do away with them.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470