See No Evil: Phoenix’s Ethics Commission hides more than it finds

It 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 superintendent 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 commission dismissed the case against Pastor with little explanation.

(Want to file an ethics complaint? Read our guide.)

Besides a formal and boilerplate one-page explanation posted on the commission 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 smattering 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 commission barely has enough members for a quorum. And most concerningly, for citizens 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 officials. 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.

The commission has operated with only four members ever since. By law, all four commissioners’ votes are needed to refer a violation to the city council, where seven of nine councilmember votes are required to take any action. In practice, those high hurdles have prevented any ethics complaints from holding city officials to account.

“The ethics commission has worsened ethics at the city,” Thacker said. “Before, I could call someone at city staff and I could argue and we could discuss the issues. Now they do it in private in executive session. This has backed things up, not moved things forward.”

As Thacker knows from experience, once ethics complaints go to the commission, not much comes out.

Born in Louisiana, Thacker came to Phoenix 12 years ago to sell software. Now retired at just 47, he was radicalized for the cause of municipal transparency when an effort to build a frisbee golf course ran into a brick wall of city bureaucracy. Still possessed of Cajun fire, he’s now a mainstay at Ethics Commission meetings.

One such meeting was on Jan. 16. Thacker — and his extremely well-behaved dog, an Australian shepherd named after British philosopher Christopher Hitchens that accompanies Thacker everywhere — sat in a small conference room at City Hall. The commission was set to consider a complaint Thacker had brought nearly three years earlier against Charley Jones, a local zoning board member.

Five minutes into the meeting, the commission broke into an executive session to discuss the complaint privately. When the executive session ended an hour later, the commission’s four members swiftly voted to dismiss Thacker’s complaint. He received little explanation.

For Thacker, the lack of transparency epitomizes a larger problem. Everywhere he looks, average citizens are being boxed out. You need an appointment to do anything at City Hall, he notes, and public comment at city council meetings has been limited to 30 minutes and placed at the end of the agenda.

“It’s just the constant disdain that our public servants have for the public,” he said.

Who is on the Ethics Commission?

Who are the commissioners, and what do they consider an ethics violation? We know plenty about the first question and not enough about the second.

By law, the five-person commission must be composed of at least two Democrats and two Republicans, a balance that has been thrown off following Lujan’s resignation. Without him, the people tasked with hearing civilian concerns are:

• Commission chair Samuel Leyvas III, a Republican and vice president of corporate relations and social responsibility at Valley of the Sun United Way
• Cheryl Pietkiewicz, a Republican and communications instructor at Grand Canyon University
• Patricia Sallen, a Democrat and legal ethics lawyer and consultant
• Peter Schirripa, a politically unaffiliated vice president of sales at ZipRecruiter

Collectively they decide what constitutes an ethics violation. Phoenix’s city code is vague on the subject, requiring only that “all City elected officials, employees, board members, and volunteers must maintain the utmost standards of personal integrity, truthfulness, honesty and fairness in carrying out their public duties, avoid any improprieties in their roles as public servants, comply with all applicable laws, and never use their City position or power for improper personal gain."

So far the commission hasn’t met a complaint it feels violates that standard. Phoenix spokesperson Ashley Patton said eight complaints awaited the ethics commission when it began operating and that no new complaints have been filed.

Since March, the commission has shot down complaints against former councilmember Sal DiCiccio for allegedly spreading disinformation on social media; a complaint former councilmember Carlos Garcia for a questionable interaction with a police officer after being pulled over; and Ramos’ complaint against Pastor.

Ramos thought Pastor’s conduct violated Chapter III, Section 4 of the City Charter, which stipulates that “neither the Council nor any Member thereof shall give orders to any subordinates of the City Manager, either publicly or privately.” The charter’s prescribed punishment is removal from office.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t be going on with city councilpeople getting into stuff down at the worker level,” said Painter, the ethics lawyer. “Because obviously there’s all sorts of favoritism, cronyism, you name it.”

Ramos explored his options vigorously. He said he went to city auditors, human resources and the city attorney, all of whom said they don’t investigate councilmembers. Records show City Attorney Julie Kreigh told him the city attorney “does not have this authority.” In the meantime Ramos was demoted, though records show the city offered to remove the discipline notice related to his demotion from his department’s files if he’d drop his complaint.

“I told them to shove it,” Ramos said.

The city’s human resources department did investigate Pimentel. A draft of a report obtained by New Times did not substantiate the allegation that Pimentel was creating falsified work orders but did find that Pimentel and another man were submitting false claims to the city's integrity line to try to get people fired. The report said Pimentel "misused his relationship to city officials, as well as his perceived position of importance, in a way that has caused negative impacts to Streets personnel morale and wellbeing."

Phoenix spokesperson Dan Wilson said the HR probe into Pimentel was finalized by a different investigator after the first one resigned midway through. New Times has requested the finalized version but has not received it.

Pimentel retired in March 2024, about eight months before he was eligible to receive a pension. (In his resignation letter, Pimentel complained that he had “been subjected to retaliation and harassment in the workplace, which has been both targeted and severe.”) But Ramos still wanted an investigation of Pastor, eventually filing a complaint with the Ethics Commission about a month before the commission was impaneled.

He went to the meeting in which his complaint was scheduled to be discussed, but the commission canceled it. (It has canceled four meetings, in July, August, October and November). Ramos was unable to make the next meeting. When the commission released its boilerplate dismissal, no one from the commission or the city informed him, Ramos said.

“I had to look it up myself.”

Executive session issues

Thacker has been to several Ethics Commission meetings, though he spends much of them excluded from the proceedings while the commission goes into executive session.

On Jan. 24, Thacker filed a complaint with the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes alleging the Ethics Commission violated open meetings law during its two most recent meetings. Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Mayes, declined to comment on Thacker’s complaint. Thacker also told the commissioners in a Feb. 6 virtual meeting that he would file a lawsuit against them rather than wait for Mayes’ decision.

Thacker’s chances might not be great. Gregg Leslie, the executive director of the First Amendment Clinic at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, doesn’t see an issue. Executive sessions are allowed under Arizona law for particular circumstances like discussing hiring, contracts, security plans — and discipline.

“If the ethics complaint is part of a disciplinary proceeding, it looks like it would be covered,” Leslie wrote in an email.

Yet from an ethics perspective — not what’s legally required but what makes for good governance — the frequent use of executive sessions is counterproductive, experts say.

Phoenix’s commission often opts to weigh ethics complaints in private rather than in a public forum. During its September, December and January meetings, it spent the majority of meeting time in executive session, barring members of the public from hearing its discussions. Letters announcing the commission’s decisions — all dismissals — are viewable online but do not explain the commission’s reasoning in each case.

Painter, the former White House lawyer, said blanket secrecy is a concerning habit for an ethics commission.

“There needs to be a lot more information available to the public,” he said. “There’s a strong presumption in favor of hearings involving ethics allegations against senior city officials (being) public. At a minimum, the transcript should be available. There should be a court reporter and a transcript.”

John Pelissero, Director of Government Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics of Santa Clara University, echoed the sentiment. While he noted that some privacy measures should be taken, “If you’re an ethics commission, among other things, the public should expect they would demonstrate that they believe in being as transparent as possible.”

When asked about the commission’s liberal use of executive sessions, Leyvas told New Times that “like most ethics commissions across the country, there are confidentiality provisions in place to protect the integrity of investigations and the rights of those involved.”

A frustrating process

To get answers out of the Ethics Commission — or at least to attempt it — you might have to seek them in person. Thacker has made it his mission to do just that.

At the Jan. 16 meeting, the commission considered Thacker’s complaint about Jones. Thacker alleged that Jones failed to disclose a conflict of interest in 2021 while serving on the Alhambra Village Planning Committee, which makes zoning decisions before referring them to the city council.

That January, the committee heard a development proposal for a new apartment complex near some properties that belonged to Jones. According to meeting records, Jones voted for the proposal, which had the potential to increase the value of his holdings. Months later, Jones announced the sale of a property on Central Avenue for $2.43 million.

Aaron Duell, an attorney who represented Jones before the Ethics Commission, argued that Jones did not have a “substantial interest” in the development proposal because he had already been paid $80,000 a few days before the vote took place and that sale price of the property was already fixed. Jones did not respond to an email inquiry from New Times.

A similar ethics complaint against Jones was made by former Phoenix resident Diane Mihalsky. Her complaint noted that the city’s own ethics handbook for board and commission members spells out that it would be a violation for a board member to vote on “a zoning or license application that may affect the value of the board member’s property.”

When weighing Thacker’s complaint, the commission did not seem to have considered that passage. All four members voted to dismiss the case, saying there was no violation of the city’s ethics law.

Thacker responded with outrage.

“Are we just disregarding the entire ethics handbook?” Thacker asked the commissioners. “Are we just going to go by the one-paragraph statute as our go-to and the examples given in the handbook are meaningless? Because if so, stop the charade of putting this up and stop holding these meetings.”

Pietkiewicz was puzzled as to why Thacker cared.

"Thank you for expressing your passion. It is very clear in your vocalizations and clearly in your writing, you have a clear desire for a particular outcome," she said, with some condescension. "So my question is, why is this such an interest to you?"

"I don't care about Charley Jones,” Thacker responded. “I care about ethics at the city — the bigger picture.” He noted that there has not been a single sustained ethics violation in Phoenix in a decade. "This is a symptom of what's going on,” he said.

After that meeting, New Times asked Leyvas whether the body considers the ethics handbook beyond just the city code when making decisions. Three times, Leyvas declined to give a yes-or-no answer, saying it was best to wait for the final report of the decision to be issued. Notably, there are no final reports for any decisions available online.

“I gave you an answer. It’s an answer,” Leyvas said. “Call it a non-responsive answer if you want, but it’s an answer.”

After the meeting, Leyvas followed up in an email.

“I felt bad about our interaction,” he wrote. “So wanted to offer a more thoughtful response to your original question: I think my obligation as a member of the Ethics Commission is to thoughtfully consider all relevant policies, laws and regulations when a question is on the table.”

True to the commission’s form, it wasn’t a direct answer.