The scandals don’t stop at Los Angeles City Hall. With a fourth councilor Curren Price charged with corruption in about three years, there should be some soul searching in the halls of power. How have so many leaders gone astray and how can LA clean up its rotten political culture?

An obvious and overdue solution is actually

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Pretty simple: Ask voters to strengthen the Ethics Committee, which is the watchdog over the city’s elected officials, candidates for office, political appointees, and lobbyists.

When the commission was created by voters in 1990, it was considered one of the most ambitious ethics reforms in the country. But three decades of oversight and enforcement have revealed that the commission lacks the independence and authority to be the watchdog Angelenos needs or expects.

The city council and the mayor decide how much the commission funds, which determines the size of its staff of investigators and enforcers, and whether to implement recommended changes to ethics laws. This means that the regulator needs permission from the people who are regulated to do its job. Naturally, this regulation constitutes an obstacle to supervision and enforcement.

For example, the Ethics Committee has been trying for 15 years to make common sense revisions to the city’s lobbying law to make paid advocacy more transparent and easier to enforce the rules. The city council repeatedly refused to consider the proposals and they died. In 2018, a former employee of the Ethics Commission filed a whistleblower complaint after being told by the commission’s management that a council member had threatened to cut the department’s budget if it did not relax rules on gifts for politicians, according to one story in the Times.

Last year, the Ethics Commission recommended a dozen changes to the City Charter that would give the Commission more power and independence. But those proposals have been on the backburner while the city council’s ad hoc committee on city government reform focuses on creating an independent redistribution committee and deciding whether to expand the city council.

But ethics reform got a boost last week, and not just because of the criminal charges against Price. A group of political scientists has released their recommendations for governance reform in Los Angeles, and they have prioritized strengthening the Ethics Committee. Their rationale makes sense: If Angelenos are asked to expand the city council and create more politicians, they should know that in return they are getting as clean a city government as possible.

In particular, the LA Governance Reform Project recommended amending the city charter to mandate the city council

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finally act on the ordinances proposed by the committee and allow the committee to bypass the city council and put proposed policies on the ballot for voters to decide. Those are smart changes.

Any reform ballot measure should also guarantee a minimum budget for the committee so that politicians cannot cut funding to pressure ethical workers. It’s also worth having a larger committee with some non-political appointees who aren’t tied to elected officials. LA commissioners are elected by the city’s elected leaders. At Long Beach

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the seven-member ethics committee includes four commissioners appointed by elected officials, and those four commissioners elect the other three.

Can these changes prevent more corruption scandals? They could help. An authorized committee could potentially respond more quickly to ethical issues as they arise, without the

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skepticism or obstruction of the council.

For example, one of the allegations against Price is that he voted for projects developed by companies that employ his wife, creating a conflict of interest. Price withdrew in some cases related to his wife’s affairs, but not others, according to Times reporting in 2019.

City law requires appointed commissioners to file paperwork when they have a conflict of interest and abstain from voting. Those recuses are tracked

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and conflicts of interest of Supervisory Board members are assessed when they retire three times a year. However, elected officials are not required to follow the same reporting rules and are only required to make a verbal statement when they decide to revoke. That makes it more difficult for the public to detect and understand the conflicts of interest of elected officials. If unpaid volunteer commissioners have to document their recuses, why shouldn’t councilors do the same? That is something that a competent committee could consider.

The parade of scandals has created momentum for major changes in LA city government. But the work will not be complete without also a reform of ethics.