Editor's note: A previous column introduced the discussion. Read "Woody Hunt, other business leaders think corruption has crippled competition, contributed to the poverty in El Paso", published June 10, 2009, for background. For an overview of the El Paso public corruption investigation, read "Public Corruption 101: The archives".

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In a military conflict, the first objective is to win the fight and the second harder goal should be to win the peace once the shooting is over. That is where a lot of wars are lost.

El Paso is in the midst of a war of sorts, a protracted campaign by federal authorities against public and private corruption that goes deeper than any of us knows.

How will this community address the fact that its public institutions and a segment of its private sector have been compromised by a deeply imbedded system of bribery, conspiracies, tainted bidding and contracts and dirty alliances that the federal corruption investigation may not cure?

How does El Paso reach a new consensus of honesty?

First, you have to admit there’s a problem. Sometimes it takes a wake-up call. For an alcoholic, it can be a DWI arrest.

El Pasoans have watched a four-year FBI investigation that has taken down 11 politicians, public servants and professionals and led to five indictments with more to come. That’s the big red fire engine with its siren blaring and lights flashing that roars up and stops in front of your house at 2 a.m. Are we awake yet?

Woody Hunt, head of a handful of companies and ventures under Hunt Companies, the Greater Chamber’s President Richard Dayoub and others in the business community think it’s time.

One of the others is Eduardo Rodriguez, a former senior vice president of El Paso Electric Co., who said, “People have said many times there are things about this community that cause people to wonder why it’s not more prosperous and more capable. So, it kind of begs that question because we can be doing better. We should be doing better.”

Federal prosecutions and prison sentences may take care of the most obvious problems and individuals. But what about the conditions that allowed corruption to thrive?

’This whole community is shot through with it’

“You’re dealing with the second or third or fourth generation of this,” said one local engineer and businessman who asked not to be named because it could hurt his business with local government.

He thinks the pattern of bribery for officials’ votes and public contracts actually began in the 1940s and has been handed down generation to generation ever since.

“This whole community is shot through with it,” he said.

He wasn’t just talking about affairs at the county courthouse and the school districts where the FBI investigation has focused so far, but about City Hall as well.

Rodriguez, Hunt and Dayoub are deliberately vague about how they and others might go after the problems. It’s not at all clear who the others are or will be.

We may see a series of communitywide discussions that could produce in a community code of ethics and/or best business practices standards that would be developed publicly and put up for approval by local governments and the business community.

Some years ago, when Hunt was on the UT Board of Regents, he often talked about how, in the 1950s, El Paso was ahead of the major cities of the Southwest in income, education and standard of living.

Some have blamed the city’s slide on the choices city fathers made decades ago to sell El Paso as a cheap labor town.

That view, it seems, is being replaced or augmented by this idea that corruption has infected our politics and business, crippling both, driving honest companies out of business or out of town while keeping others away.

“This is an issue that the business and elected community is concerned with, and they want to find a way to move against these allegations and suspicions,” Rodriguez said. “It’s in everybody’s best interest to have a system that serves everybody’s interest … without aspects of undue influence.”

Rodriguez said he is more or less in charge of the process of introducing the proposal that he, the chamber, Hunt and others want to involve the community in, starting later this summer.

“Our objective is to engage the community as a whole to determine whether there is a limited perception about corruption that some people have misbehaved and that the law enforcement process will address it, and the public will move on from there,” Rodriguez said. “That’s probably not the case.

“It’s probably a little more deeply rooted and because of that, it probably behooves the public to think about it and about whether things should be done to change that.”

A community engagement, not the Downtown Plan

Rodriguez said he and others working on this project know that something cooked up in secret would be viewed with suspicion.

“I’m aware of the Downtown Plan,” he said, referring to the plan the Paso Del Norte Group unveiled in 2006 that caused a huge controversy because it was developed outside El Paso without the business sector’s participation.

“This is a community engagement,” Rodriguez said. “So far, there’s nothing written down. These are all discussion points. They will be among things that will be laid out in a public setting."

A community ethics code of some type could emerge from the process, he said, if “there’s a consensus that this is the best way to address best practices both in government and the way people work with government so it’s not just a matter of influence and connection.”

But a code of ethics, as we have seen at the County Courthouse and City Hall this year, can create as many problems as it solves.

“Ok, how do you fix this?” Rodriguez said. “Corruption is not acceptable. Regardless of what happens with these corruption cases, the fact of the matter is it reflects that something is not right and that there is an element that’s not in line with what we believe is the proper role for government officials or people who are doing business with the government.

“At the end of the day, if a society, community, city or state wants to address this, it has to come through the citizens.”

Whatever the community might come up with has got to be realistic, practical and effective. That is where the work gets hard.

Is there a model, a city or organization that has developed a process and gone through it to address some systemic problem successfully?

No, not really, Rodriguez said.

An Internet search turns up at least one organization devoted to weeding out corruption and establishing new business ethics that conducted it second annual conference in May, the Canadian Business Ethics Research Network. [link]

“You can have codes and standards, but if people don’t follow them or believe in them, you have nothing,” Rodriguez said. “You can decide there are six things that should be done, but if nothing’s behind it, it’s as good as nothing.

“At the end of the day, there’s not one thing that affects the situation, no silver bullet. If there had been, we would have done it a long time ago.”

Emphasizing that “nothing has been written down yet,” Rodriguez said the opening community discussions on what to do about the corruption in El Paso will probably come about the time school starts.

Will it make a difference?

“When the price of change becomes more competitive than the price of staying the same, change will occur,” Rodriguez said. “People are slow to move in that direction unless they see the value that change will bring.”

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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 351-0605, ext. 30, or 630-6622.