Mayor of LA had received over $100,000 worth of tickets
The Los Angeles City Ethics Commission has voted to ban the city’s elected officials from accepting tickets to events in exchange for performing a ceremonial function, if the host of the event has business before the city.
The common practice of comping elected officials with tickets to events as is practiced in many cities was struck down by the LA Ethics Commission because the value of the “gifts” was getting out of hand.
The acceptance of high value gifts by all citizens including elected officials is supposed to be recorded as income according to the IRS. In a recent controversy the Green Bay Packers came under fire for selling Super Bowl tickets to elected officials at face values of about $1,000 when similar tickets were selling online for as much as $8,500. Such practices have been abolished as unethical in cities all across the country. If practices like this were conducted inside a public corporation and these tickets were shares of stock, they would not only trigger a taxable event but could be characterized as insider trading.
The cities that have taken definitive action to abolish this form of making something available to elected officials that are not available to the general public have done the right thing. It is a good time for Evansville to put this situation to rest and follow these other cities examples by abolished this alleged practice.
Here is a link to the LA article.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2010/09/villaraigosa_ethics_tickets_1.php
I wonder if some evansville officials are working on backdated checks. Kind of hard to dummy up credit card receipts when you don’t have any.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/03/03/2010-03-03_strike_three_gov_paterson_hit_with_new_ethics_violation_charges_over_free_yankee.html
“In a recent controversy the Green Bay Packers came under fire for selling Super Bowl tickets to elected officials at face values of about $1,000 when similar tickets were selling online for as much as $8,500.”
What should be done is anyone selling any ticket for greater than face value should be allowed to do it. Then, after they file their next tax return, hit them with an audit, fines and penalties for failing to claim a capital gain on the ticket(s). After the IRS gets done with them, the venue should then press charges for scalping. Allowing this practice is assanine.
Geez, taking away all the freebies from politicians is really harsh:-) Poor babies might have to take on a second job, like many of their constituents, or even, gasp, sit in bleacher seats! That is ‘scrimination! How will you ever get anyone to spend a million bucks to get elected to a 4 year office that pays $125,000 @ year if you exclude them from all the graft?
I think this was removed from the Evansville contracts 15 years ago. Ask a councilman, but I think I am correct.
Removed as in it is okay to get tickets free now but it wasn’t before?
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