Candidates take a stand on ethics proposals

We’ve heard a lot of ideas for rules that will clean up DC’s political culture, from the backers of Initiative 70, from multiple DC councilmembers, and from citizen groups like DC for Democracy. What do our at-large candidates think?

This week, Let’s Choose DC, a partnership of Greater Greater Washington, DCist, and PoPville, asked the candidates running in the April 23 special election to take a stand on 6 proposals from last year:

• Ban or limit outside employment
• Eliminate or constrain constituent service funds
• Ban corporate contributions to campaigns
• Ban “bundling” from multiple entities controlled by the same person
• Ban contributions by contractors and/or lobbyists who do business with DC
• Forbid free or discounted legal services, travel gifts, sports tickets for councilmembers

We asked the candidates to explain whether they were for or against each proposal, along with any explanation they wished to give and any other proposals besides these 6 which they would push for if elected. Perry Redd, Elissa Silverman, Matthew Frumin, Michael Brown, Paul Zukerberg, John Settles, and Patrick Mara submitted responses. Anita Bonds’ campaign manager expressed interest in responding but did not yet submit something.

You can see and rate responses (starting with a randomly-selected candidate) now. Some candidates specifically addressed each of the proposals in their responses, while a few did not appear to specifically take a stand on each as the question asked. When you rate the responses, please factor that in to your rating on whether, or how fully, the candidate answered the question.