Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki signed an ordinance requiring ethics training for all city employees.
The legislation recently passed by Wilmington City Council requires annual ethics training for all employees including elected and appointed officials.
City employees will be required to either attend or watch a recording of an Ethics Commission approved training presentation, and they also have to submit a certification verifying they attended the session.
The city will publicly list the elected officials who complete the training. Earlier this year, all city elected officials and the Mayor’s senior appointees voluntarily attended ethics training.
Wilmington Ethics Commission chair Bill Johnston says this is modernizing the ethics portion of the city code.
"What we're floating in the training is educating folks regarding certain provisions of the code relating to conflict of interest, we need to be impartial, potential abuse of office, prohibited political activities," said Johnston. "We're trying to be as informative as we can be."
Johnston credits one council member with pursuing the idea.
"Council member (James) Spadola suggested the possibility of making the ethics training mandatory so that everyone associated with the city as an elected official or appointed official or City employee would receive the training and in his view receive the benefit of the training," said Johnston.
Spadola sponsored the legislation.
Johnston notes the ethics training requirement wasn’t prompted by any particular incident.
