BY TJ L’HEUREUX I t wasn’t a meeting he wanted, but in July 2022, Simon Ramos found himself sitting across from Phoenix City Councilmember Laura Pastor. Ramos was a field services superin- tendent with the city’s Street Transportation Department, where he oversaw the maintenance of traffic signals. During an audit, Ramos said, he found falsified work orders for jobs that weren’t actually being done. He brought them to the attention of the foreman in charge of that section, Marshall Pimentel. Notes typed by Ramos and handwritten by department assistant director Briiana Velez describe what happened next. Days later, Pastor told the two that Pimentel was one of her best friends from high school, lecturing Ramos and Velez that she “trusts him and believes anything he says” and that “he would not lie.” “She was basically telling me to leave her friend alone,” Ramos told Phoenix New Times in an interview. Pastor did not respond to a request for comment. Ramos was incensed. That 2022 meeting kicked off a two-and-a-half-year quest to seek accountability. Eventually the case landed in the purview of Phoenix’s newly formed Ethics Commission, a body tasked with investigating ethics complaints against city officials. The Ethics Commission turned out to be where Ramos’ hope for accountability died. In a 2-2 vote on Sept. 19, the commis- sion dismissed the case against Pastor with little explanation. Besides a formal and boilerplate one- page explanation posted on the commis- sion website along with Ramos’ complaint, there are no details publicly available about how the commission reached its decision. Ramos says the commission hasn’t even posted his full complaint. What’s available online amounts to a hard-to-parse smat- tering of documents. That’s not how an ethics commission is supposed to operate, said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former White House ethics lawyer. “To have public confidence in a city ethics board, you do need public accessibility and for the public to know what’s going on,” Painter said. “It needs to be clear to the public what happened, what the rule is, what the commission decided and why.” In Phoenix, however, opacity is the commission’s default. Much of the body’s work happens behind closed doors. Public records of its decisions are contained mostly in meeting minutes or one-page decision summaries, which are bare-bones and written in wonky bureaucratic code rather than in plain language. The commis- sion barely has enough members for a quorum. And most concerningly, for citi- zens hoping for accountability in their city government, the commission has yet to sustain a single ethics complaint it has reviewed. The few citizens who follow the commission’s work have found the past year positively maddening. “The ethics commission should be at the center of public accountability and transparency,” said Jeremy Thacker of Phoenix, who has been a thorn in the commission’s side at meetings. “It’s the exact opposite.” Ramos puts it more succinctly. “It’s a smoke show.” HISTORY OF THE ETHICS COMMISSION The Ethics Commission is nearly a year old. Its early returns aren’t encouraging. The commission began meeting last March, tasked with reviewing citizen complaints about city officials who may have violated Phoenix’s ethics and gifts policies. As it approaches its first birthday, the commission has little to publicly show for its work. It has held just eight meetings and has yet to refer a complaint to the Phoenix City Council for adjudication. Only four of the complaints made to the commission — including the one against Pastor and a combined three against former councilmembers Sal DiCiccio and Carlos Garcia — are available online. Phoenix residents have filed only eight ethics complaints in eight years. Compare that against the likes of Philadelphia, a city of comparable size, which saw 51 complaints or referrals in 2024 alone. “It’s a statistical improbability that we’re not having the same amount,” Thacker said. “It’s just a matter of do we care or not.” Even creating an ethics commission was a slog. When the city council created the commission in 2017, Phoenix was the largest city in America without one. The council took another six years to appoint any commissioners, a period during which complaints entered a black hole at the city attorney’s office, where they were tossed around in a game of bureaucratic hot potato. In some cases, the city attorney — who also represents city officials — was charged with investigating those same offi- cials. What officials decided, or whether they decided anything, was unknowable unless you were willing to be an enormous pest. When a five-member commission was finally impaneled in December 2023, it lost a commissioner almost immediately. As New Times documented at the time, commissioner Louie Lujan had resigned as the mayor of a small Southern California town in 2010 after misrepresenting campaign finance statements. Lujan then agreed to a plea deal and was sentenced to three years of probation, giving up his spot on the ethics commission a week after he accepted it. SEE NO EVIL A year in, Phoenix’s Ethics Commission hides more than it finds. One ethics complaint, which the Ethics Commission dismissed, concerned Phoenix City Councilmember Laura Pastor. (Courtesy of city of Phoenix) >> p 12 Phoenix resident Jeremy Thacker sits somewhat impatiently on the sidelines of a meeting of the Phoenix Ethics Commission. (Photo by TJ L’Heureux) Without a functioning ethics commission, there was no independent body to investigate complaints about unethical behavior among elected officials or employees for the city of Phoenix. (Courtesy of city of Phoenix)
