Dear Editor:

The proposed Negron/Colon ethics ordinance for the City of Bethlehem is actually too generous to campaign contributors. The ordinance proposes an absolute limit of $1,000 per individual per election cycle. But suppose I don’t need anything from the city council during this election cycle but anticipate requiring something from the council during the next election cycle. If I would like to earn some goodwill, I could mobilize family and employees to each contribute $1,000 during this cycle. Perhaps the overall total will reach $10,000, which is more than the cost of some city council campaigns. During the next cycle I would have to scale back to avoid recusal, but hopefully the recipients will remember my largesse favorably. Perhaps the contributions I engineered enabled the reelected incumbents to start the next cycle with money in the bank.

What is the remedy? Extending the recusal period into one or more additional election cycles is one possibility, but where do we draw the line? The simpler and more meaningful remedy is to limit contributions to $1,000 per extended family and/or $1,000 per organization, rather than $1,000 per individual.

Note that in this example, total contributions of $2,500 (e.g. contributions of $250 each from ten individuals) from an extended family or an organization would not trigger recusal. Thus the recusal trigger, whatever it is, should also be per extended family or per organization, not per individual.

It may be argued that campaigns are costly. But do we really need second and third mailers that simply rearrange the words and pictures found on the first mailer?

Bill Scheirer

Bethlehem, PA 18018