More questions for McDonald

It's not enough for an elected official's conduct to be merely within the law. It must withstand the scrutiny of voters.

Commissioner of Revenue Sharon McDonald's conduct has put that standard to the test. On Tuesday, Pilot reporters Harry Minium and Meghan Hoyer reported that an audit had cleared McDonald of illegality for using a city credit card on extended lobbying trips to Richmond. But it said she should have kept better records.

That qualifies as relatively good news only when compared to reports last week that McDonald had hired both of her daughters as accounting technicians at $12 an hour. Even assuming that McDonald's daughters are the best accounting technicians on Planet Earth, and $12 is a huge discount on their worth as employees, that arrangement is simply wrong.

For reasons of fairness and appearance, nepotism is barred in many businesses. If the prohibitions aren't quite as severe as they once were, there are precious few companies that would allow a manager of a 40-person department to hire her own child.

That's in essence what McDonald did, an arrangement attracting criticism from everywhere.

"We don't want to take any chance of the public losing confidence in our office," said Circuit Court Clerk George Schaefer, who is also a constitutional officer. "I can't speak for Sharon's policies. But I would not hire a relative. It's all about appearances."

For McDonald, it also appears to be about two wrongs adding up to a right. In a telling response to questions about hiring her daughters, she produced a list of two dozen government employees related to city officials.

It is for city officials to decide whether nepotism was at work in any of those cases. But McDonald's hiring of her daughters, while apparently legal, is unlikely to withstand even the barest scrutiny in the court of public opinion.

Her use of a city credit card to pay bills incurred in Richmond - some of them charged while she lobbied against Norfolk's financial interests - suffers a similar fate. The auditor's conclusions include a call to tighten a half-dozen policies before McDonald gets another card. She has already begun changing procedures to ensure her record-keeping is "above reproach."

That may not be enough. McDonald's office has been the focus of a series of damaging allegations this summer, including ones about her lobbying activities in Richmond, the changing status of one of her employees, and a feud with the treasurer.

Apparently tiring of the questions, McDonald has begun trying to make it harder for reporters to examine how she and her office conduct business.

"[I]n response to an Aug. 3 request from The Pilot to obtain her e-mail and correspondence during the last three months, [McDonald] asked for $2,000 to provide the information," Minium wrote recently. "Generally, the city of Norfolk does not charge The Pilot for copies of correspondence, a fact that City Attorney Bernard A. Pishko reminded McDonald of recently in an e-mail.

"However, McDonald said that she personally needed to oversee compiling the correspondence and would charge $65.36 per hour to do so."

That makes it some of the most valuable e-mail ever created.

If a politician asks people for their vote, there are things she must do in exchange.

She must do her job fairly and to the best of her ability. She must make only promises she can keep. She must respect the office she holds and do nothing to dishonor it. She must take care with taxpayer dollars. She must do all of that openly.

Sharon McDonald has violated at least one of those expectations, and arguably more. If voters disapprove, their ballots in November 2013 should reflect their displeasure.