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City Ethics Board probing Councilwoman Miller's e-mail endorsement of Eighth District candidate

This week, City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller's office e-mailed a statement to the news media endorsing candidate Verna Tyner for the Eighth District Council seat Miller is vacating.

Ethics Board investigators searched the City Hall office of retiring Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller (left) on Friday looking for evidence that she used city resources to aid the campaign of Council candidate Verna Tyner (right).
Ethics Board investigators searched the City Hall office of retiring Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller (left) on Friday looking for evidence that she used city resources to aid the campaign of Council candidate Verna Tyner (right).Read more

This week, City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller's office e-mailed a statement to the news media endorsing candidate Verna Tyner for the Eighth District Council seat Miller is vacating.

It was written on Miller's Council letterhead and was sent from her communications director's city e-mail account - both potential violations of ethics rules that prohibit campaign work from being done on city time and with city resources.

On Friday, investigators from the Philadelphia Board of Ethics visited City Hall with two administrative subpoenas - one for Miller's office and one for the Office of the Council President.

The Ethics Board, which has the authority to demand documents from parties involved in city campaigns, requested information from the hard drives of four Miller staffers: communications director Michael Quintero Moore, aide Kaycee Nickens, community organizer Angelic Wise, and legislative assistant David Yurky, according to a Council source who had seen the subpoenas.

A subpoena obtained by The Inquirer requested "any and all documents and things related to the production of campaign materials, campaign correspondence, and/or sample ballots for the May 2011 primary election by the Office of Councilmember Donna Reed Miller and/or her staff."

The subpoenas were issued by the Ethics Board, and signed by Chairman Richard Glazer.

J. Shane Creamer, executive director of the Ethics Board, and his director of enforcement, Michael Cooke, arrived shortly after 10 a.m. with a technical consultant, who took images off the hard drives of staff computers and the copying machine in Miller's office, according to the Council source.

The investigation primarily concerns materials that would have been printed or copied for Tyner's campaign, the source said.

Investigators came and went for several hours, with members of the police Civil Affairs Unit guarding the doors to two Miller offices on the third floor.

Creamer and his crew emerged about 2:30 p.m. but would not comment.

Charles Gibbs, an attorney for Miller, told reporters outside her office that the councilwoman would not be available for comment.

A statement issued a short time later from his law firm, Bowman Kavulich Ltd., said: "Councilwoman Reed Miller is cooperative and responding to their request. No further comment is being made at this time."

Council President Anna C. Verna said through a spokesman that her "office will fully cooperate with any ongoing investigation."

David Dunphy, an adviser to the Tyner campaign, said that the issue arose from "an unfortunate error" and that the campaign "had no idea any of this was going on."

"Obviously this is unfortunate, but it's not so much a Tyner campaign issue as a Council issue," he said.

Tyner, a former chief of staff to two Council members, did not return a call seeking comment. She is locked in a seven-way battle to replace Miller, who is retiring.

Representatives of two Eighth District candidates reached out to the Committee of Seventy, the government-watchdog group, to complain about the endorsement on Miller's Council letterhead.

The committee referred the callers - one from candidate Robin Tasco's camp and one who asked to remain anonymous - to the Ethics Board.

Based on her experience, Tyner was considered an early favorite in the race, along with Cindy Bass, an aide to U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, and Howard Treatman, a wealthy businessman and lawyer.

In a statement, Treatman called the episode "yet another example of the kind of backroom politics that I've been running against in this campaign." He called on Miller to be "open and forthright about this misstep."

Bass spokesman Joe Corrigan said: "We need someone who's going to be new and different and responsive to the neighborhoods of the Eighth District, but not someone who wants to buy this seat for their personal Monopoly board."