Our message for Ethics Commission Executive Director John St. Croix has not yet been returned.
On numerous occasions, Luby forced ethics to follow its own rules; he was the one who first noticed the financial irregularities that culminated in the City College scandal. It earned him respect outside his office and, it seems, enmity within. As we noted before:
In 2004, he exposeda document-destroying scheme
and was subsequentlyhonored by the Society of Professional Journalists
. In 2008, hefiled a complaint when it became apparent that large swaths of data
would be lost if Ethics carried out a planned database switchover (the
data was preserved). Then, in May of last year, he filed yet another whistleblower
complaint: Luby says that despite his repeated warnings that Ethics was
overcharging a candidate for fees he had already paid, a judgment
against the candidate including the overcharges had been passed on to
the city's collections department. (Luby told us that the overcharge
was only enough for, a couple of drinks at a bar; this was something he says he did on principle). Luby's
complaint to the District Attorney and controller quickly rectified the
matter.
Roughly a week after filing the complaint, Luby receivedan official reprimand for using his office computer and e-mail to write
to the state's Fair Political Practices Commission to offer his
personal input on California campaign finance laws. This exact charge
was then mirrored in a subsequent anonymous complaint, as was the threat
of termination later echoed by [Deputy Director Mabel] Ng.
and @SFWeekly
