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Follow TURFDMN: Tollway Authority needs to change its ways
EDITORIAL: NTTA must button down on conflicts
Dallas Morning News
Jan. 4, 2012
Suppose your real estate agent and the seller of the home you wanted to buy were relatives. Or maybe they had business ties.
You’d want to know that information, right? You’d want to know it so you could judge whether the potential conflict of interest made it prudent for you to alter your plans.
The same principle holds true with public entities. Yet faced with similar conflicts, real or perceived, the North Texas Tollway Authority board often just looks the other way.
This isn’t a smart way to do business. Nor is it ethical.
As Michael A. Lindenberger’s reporting on the front page of this newspaper revealed Sunday, the tollway authority’s disclosure practices are haphazard, and its ethics policies far weaker than those at other public agencies, including Dallas Area Rapid Transit, the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport board and various boards and commissions at Dallas City Hall. This is unacceptable. The tollway authority board must strengthen its policies and police its actions.
For example, it is standard operating procedure for board members at many public agencies to submit annual financial disclosure statements or leave the room during deliberations if members have potential voting conflicts — or both. Amazingly, the tollway authority requires neither. This is an agency that distributes millions of dollars on road projects and services. Its actions have huge consequences. It should take seriously the appearance of favoritism. Says former chairman Victor Vandergriff: “The potential conflicts are allowed to taint everything else we do.”
The lack of clear, tough board guidelines has resulted in some Monty Python-like moments. Former authority chairman Paul Wageman says that, as chairman, he was careful to err on the side of caution and regularly abstained from voting on issues that involved his law firm. Yet, Lindenberger found that Wageman regularly participated in the board’s deliberations of those matters. The board’s legal adviser reportedly ruled that such conduct was proper. But when this newspaper requested a copy of the legal advice and the reasoning behind it, the board’s lawyer declined, citing attorney-client privilege.
That opinion should be made public.
In another instance, Kenneth Barr, the agency’s current chairman, failed to disclose that his brother has worked at Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell, which has been the authority’s outside law firm since 1953. And on another occasion, Barr recommended a firm formed by Gov. Rick Perry’s former chief of staff Brian Newby and state Sen. Wendy Davis , D-Fort Worth, without telling board colleagues that Newby and Davis work at Cantey Hanger, a law firm that worked on NTTA’s Chisholm Trail Parkway, or that the Newby-Davis firm and Barr maintained offices in space owned by Cantey Hanger.
These sorts of undisclosed relationships, flushed out by a sunset-review process triggered by newspaper scrutiny, cast a cloud of doubt over the North Texas Tollway Authority’s independence and, as a result, the prudence of its business decisions. We expect Barr and the board to be true to their word and move quickly to beef up the authority’s ethics and disclosure rules. The authority board owes it to those it serves to be better than “business as usual.”