Departments and agencies of the city and county of Denver are now required to report all gifts they receive worth $2,500 or more under an executive order issued today by Mayor John Hickenlooper.
The new reporting requirement was unveiled by Denver City Attorney David Fine at a meeting of the Denver Ethics Board.
L. Michael Henry, staff director of the ethics board, said that the new reporting requirements pertain to gifts to city agencies and departments, and not to individual city employees and city officials, who are already regulated.
Henry called Hickenlooper’s executive order a compromise between what the board had requested and what the Denver City Attorney’s Office had proposed.
He said the board originally proposed a $500 threshold limit and the city attorney had proposed $5,000. The compromise was the $2,500 figure.
Henry also said that the board did not want city agencies and departments to be able to accept “anonymous” donations. The compromise was that anonymous contributions are allowed with ethics board oversight.
“There was a lot of good, collaborative compromise,” Henry said. “The city’s code of ethics currently does a good job of regulating gifts given to city employees and city officials. But we’ve come to learn there is another type of horse which are gifts to the city. Until now, there has been no way of tabulating or examining those at all.”
Henry said it was not up to him to say whether the $2,500 was too high of a threshold.
One of the key components of the new requirement is that upon receipt of the reports, the Denver Clerk and Reocrder’s Office must post the reports on-line for the public to read “within a reasonable amount of time” after receiving them, said Henry.
Leslie Lawson, vice chair of the ethics board, said she is glad the reporting mechanism for departments and agencies is in place.
“We find that a good part of our job is to head off trouble,” Lawson said. “An order like this will make people ask questions.”
Fine told the board that because the reporting requirement is an executive order, it is possible to “tweak” the reporting requirements if necessary.
Under Hickenlooper’s executive order, departments and agencies must report all gifts received and accepted from Jan. 1, 2007, through March 31, 2008, to the Denver clerk and recorder no later than Aug. 1, 2008.
Beginning in 2009, departments and agencies must report all gifts received and accepted during the period from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 of the previous year to the clerk and recorder no later than Aug. 1 of each year.
Fine said the reports must include a description of the gift, the date it was given, the name of the donor, the value of the gift, the intended use or purpose of the gift, the department or agency that received the gift and the corporate affiliation and address of the donor.
The executive order says that if a gift is given anonymously, the name and corporate affiliation of the donor will be left blank but the department or agency must include all the other information required by the new reporting requirement.
The department or agency must inform the ethics board of the gift, and then the board “may” issue a “non-binding advisory opinion” regarding the proposedgift and provide it “exclusively” to the department or agency.
The executive order says departments and agencies may decline to accept a gift for any reason. They are not required to report declined gifts.
The executive order says that a gift does not include sponsorships, scholarships or grants.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
