Prince George’s County Council leaders are pushing ethics legislation to track their own spending habits, as well as those of the county executive. Council Chairwoman Ingrid Turner, D-Bowie, and Vice Chairman Eric Olson, D-College Park, have proposed a bill that would require an audit of all the accounts maintained by council members and the county executive.
The audit would be done when the elected officials left office for any reason, whether when their term in office ended, they died or they resigned, as former Councilwoman Leslie Johnson did in July after pleading guilty to conspiring to tamper with witnesses and evidence in an FBI investigation of pay-to-play schemes in Prince George’s. Johnson admitted to stuffing $79,600 in cash in her bra and underwear and flushing a $100,000 check down the toilet at the instruction of her husband, then-County Executive Jack Johnson.
“It’s a good-government piece of legislation,” Olson said. “And certainly over the last year a lot of questions have been raised, particularly about County Executive Johnson and what was going on in his office.”
Audits have never been required of council members or the county executive, while department heads such as the directors of the Department of Environmental Resources or Department of Public Works and Transportation are subject to an audit when they leave their post.
Audits were never performed for Jack or Leslie Johnson’s county accounts when they left office, according to officials.
“It’s to make sure that before they leave government, everything’s been accounted for,” Turner said. “We’re trying to bring everyone on the same level playing field.”
The audits could be performed by the county’s Office of Audits and Investigations or an outside firm, Olson said.
Some residents questioned what good an audit would do if it were only performed once, when council members or the county executive were already on their way out the door.
“If you’re trying to be accountable, it needs to be annual,” said Bob Ross, president of the Prince George’s County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It should be an audit prior to them leaving office.”
Turner said an annual audit of every council member, agency director and the county executive would be too costly. “We don’t have an endless staff to do audits of every organization or person every year,” she said.
D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown recently ordered sweeping ethics changes requiring internal disclosures of council members’ spending to avoid potential conflicts of interest. However, the reports would not be made available to the public.
County Executive Rushern Baker’s staff is reviewing the legislation and has not taken a position on the bill, said spokesman Scott Peterson.
