A series of recent ethical concerns involving Detroit officials, including City Council President and Mayor-elect Mary Sheffield, have prompted criticism of the city’s conflict-of-interest rules and the apparatus designed to ensure they’re followed.
Government ethics experts flagged poor advice from the Detroit Board of Ethics and policies that appear to allow officials to seek guidance from sources beyond that board, which can lead to conflicting determinations. City ethics training, mandated by the City Charter, is lacking with less than 10% of Detroit’s 10,000-plus public servants having taken it, the Free Press learned.
The latest ethical controversy in Detroit surfaced late in the mayoral election cycle, when the Michigan Enjoyer reported Sheffield voted to approve millions of dollars in contracts for Gayanga, a demolition company owned by Brian McKinney, whom her office confirmed she dated in 2019.
McKinney and his company have since been suspended from the city’s demolition program for allegedly using toxic dirt as infill for demolition projects. On Tuesday, Nov. 18, he’s scheduled to appear before the Detroit City Council on a request to continue doing city-funded demolition work. Sheffield’s office did not respond to the Free Press when asked if she would formally recuse herself from voting.
Sheffield requested guidance from the Detroit Board of Ethics in April of that year and was advised she did not have to disclose the relationship because the city’s ethics ordinance only requires disclosure of personal relationships when they are familial, spousal, cohabitational, or domestic partnerships. The board, however, said to “exercise caution” and “remain independent.”
“Detroit’s ethics effort has fallen short,” said Peter Letzmann, who has served as a city attorney in Detroit, Pontiac, and Troy, and lectured on ethics compliance for the Michigan Municipal League. “The system is not clear on what is expected of public officials and how that system works. The procedure itself, in terms of ethics, has to be more robust.”
In a city still struggling to recover from the economic and reputational fallout of ex-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s corruption scandal, along with more recent bribery-related indictments and criminal convictions of two former council members, Letzmann said small ethical lapses can become pernicious.
“These ethics violations just breed additional ethics violations,” Letzmann said. “It says if you’re going to do business with the city of Detroit, you’re going to have to pay an entrance fee and it may be tickets to some … event or it may be some cash payments. And that is so, so wrong.”
Other ethics issues that experts say reflect gaps in the system include:
- The July revelation that former city council member and then-mayoral candidate Saunteel Jenkins, in 2015, violated the city’s one-year cooling off period for public officials going to work for entities on whose contracts they’ve recently voted. Jenkins was told by a mayoral appointee that her move to become CEO of The Heat And Warmth Fund — a nonprofit she voted to allocate funds toward months earlier — would not violate the cooling requirement, only to later be admonished for the decision by the Board of Ethics. The board’s current executive director said the City Charter requires public officials to request ethics guidance only from the independent board, not political appointees.
- In another example of potentially seeking guidance from the wrong place, in October, Sheffield asked the city’s top attorney — who is selected by the mayor and approved by the city council — whether her taking free concert tickets from Comerica Bank had violated a city ban on gifts from entities with business or potential business with the city. Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallett cleared Sheffield’s move, later telling the Free Press: “It is expressly stated in the Charter that the Corporation Counsel may represent any city employee if it so chooses.”
- Between 2013 and 2017, former Detroit City Councilman Gabe Leland voted to approve $2 million for the family towing company where his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Fiore, was an executive. He resigned from the council in 2021 after he was convicted of misconduct in office for accepting a $7,500-campaign contribution in cash. Leland was initially indicted for soliciting $15,000 in bribes and free auto body work from a local business owner in 2017.
Sheffield approved at least $59M for McKinney’s firm
Sheffield approved $4.4 million in contracts for Detroit-based Gayanga in 2019, the year her office said she and McKinney were together, according to a Free Press review of council records available online. She approved at least $54.6 million more for the company from 2020-2022, according to the Free Press review.
Also in 2019, Sheffield said she would introduce an ordinance that would have ultimately threatened the company’s competitors with fines. That ordinance, a 51% Detroit hiring proposal, would have required demolition companies receiving city contracts to give a majority of work hours to Detroiters or face penalties. In late 2018, the Free Press reported Gayanga was the only demolition company certified by the city as a Detroit-resident business, meaning that at least 51% of its staff lived in Detroit.
Sheffield’s draft ordinance never materialized, but she has previously credited the effort with pushing Mayor Mike Duggan to add demolitions to an executive order requiring majority-Detroit hiring at certain construction projects receiving public funds.
Sheffield’s office did not respond to a Free Press request for an interview or to written questions.
Days before the Nov. 4 election, during an appearance on the Mildred Gaddis Show on 105.9-FM, Sheffield said: “What has come from all of this is that maybe we need to revisit the ethics ordinance in general and make sure that that is properly defined, and so we look at ways to continue to enhance that overall.”
As council president, Sheffield spearheaded an ordinance that boosted funding to the city’s oversight agencies, including the ethics board, for the current 2026 fiscal year. Changing the ethics ordinance could require city council or voter approval, as some portions are embedded in the city Charter.
City contracts show that Gayanga’s business ballooned around the time of the relationship as officials, including Duggan, began emphasizing Detroit-business representation in the demo program and Detroit voters in 2020 approved a $250 million bond issue that would knock down 8,000 more abandoned houses. Gayanga received just $417,000 in demolition contracts in 2017; $7 million-$9 million in city contracts each year from 2018-2020; $23 million in city contracts in 2021 and $28.5 million in 2022, according to a Free Press review of city demolition data and council records available online. Over those years, the company’s Detroit business grew to include an array of construction work, including lucrative streetscape ventures with a partner.
A spokesman for McKinney said, “All (of) Gayanga’s work was awarded via the City of Detroit Construction & Demolition in compliance with the City of Detroit office of contracting and procurement rules and processes. For every contract Gayanga was awarded, the company had to submit a bid like every other contractor. Gayanga lost more bids than it won, and definitely doesn’t feel like it received any special treatment.”
City vendors are required to disclose conflicts too, but it was not immediately clear whether McKinney disclosed his relationship with Sheffield. When asked, spokesman Shaun Wilson said “Gayanga completed all required disclosure forms.”
Law an ‘imperfect tool’
The Detroit Board of Ethics is tasked with administering the city’s ethics ordinance, whose stated aim is to prohibit public servants from participating in matters that affect their personal or financial interests.
Government ethics experts said the board should have advised Sheffield to disclose her relationship with McKinney to maintain public confidence in the contracting process.
“The board interpreted the law really narrowly,” said Davina Hurt, director of the Government Ethics Program at the Markkulla Center at Santa Clara University. “All ethicists understand the spirit of the law is to preserve public trust and avoid even the appearance of impropriety. So, I found their decision to kind of fly in the face of the stated purpose of making sure decisions are made in the public’s best interest and not influenced by personal ties, even if it’s not a domestic partnership.”
It’s not uncommon for ethics laws to fail to enumerate a broad range of personal relationships that can create conflicts, including dating relationships, Hurt and others said. Such laws more clearly address financial conflicts, which have brighter lines, versus interpersonal dynamics which can be more nebulous.
“The law is an imperfect tool to assure that the public’s trust in its officials is protected and maintained because it’s just hard to write rules that make sense in all situations,” said JoAnne Speers, principal of S2 Ethics Strategies and the former executive director of the Institute for Local Government in California, adding that public officials must be trained on not only the law, but ethical principles broadly.
Still, Sheffield — who, by 2019, had been a council member for six years — should have adhered to best practices and disclosed the relationship and recused herself, three experts the Free Press spoke to, said.
“The law is a floor, not a ceiling,” Speers said. “Ethics is about what one ought to do … It’s usually not an acceptable excuse that ‘Well, my conduct didn’t violate the law.’ The pertinent question is ‘Does the conduct violate the public trust and confidence that an official is putting the public’s interests first?’ … Perception is just (as) important, if not more so, than reality.”
Conflicting advice, sparse training
Current Detroit Board of Ethics Executive Director Christal Phillips said she also disagrees with the board’s 2019 disclosure guidance to Sheffield, which predated her 2022 appointment.
“One interesting thing is that (the board’s opinion) states that the request was ‘sparse,’” said Phillips, noting the requestor only sought guidance on whether to disclose a “personal relationship” with a vendor. “I don’t know if the board was aware of all the details at the time that we’re privy to now, so that’s unfortunate.”
The board, she said, is now “doing things differently” and trains the city’s public servants to request advice and err on the side of disclosing potential conflicts when unsure.
“I think we have improved our investigations, our opinions — we always tell people to disclose,” Phillips said.
Phillips also flagged additional problems in officials failing to seek ethics guidance from the board, specifically:
Jenkins went to Portia Roberson — then a top Duggan official who a mayoral spokesman said would not have been over the ethics board — and received guidance that conflicted with an eventual determination from the board.
Sheffield went to top city attorney Mallett for advice on whether to take Comerica Bank’s concert tickets. Mallett also weighed in on whether Sheffield violated a 2012 executive order from ex-Mayor Dave Bing prohibiting personal relationships between contractors and elected officials with “significant authority over a contract,” saying executive orders don’t apply to the council.
Mallett was appointed by Duggan with Sheffield’s procedural approval as president of the council. As mayor, Sheffield will decide whether he gets to keep his job.
The city’s ethics board, by contrast, is set up to be independent. Its seven members are evenly appointed by the city council and the mayor’s office (each governmental branch gets three appointments and the seventh member is a joint appointment). Those members then appoint the executive director tasked with day-to-day operations.
While Phillips interprets the law as saying public officials should only go to the ethics board with ethics issues, Mallett said his office is permitted to advise council members and the mayor, but that “it is never my intention to try and supplant the Board of Ethics.” He added that he did not consider his guidance to Sheffield about concert tickets to be ethics guidance, as she had already taken them.
Speers said Detroit’s law leaves it less clear than in other jurisdictions with language requiring guidance to come only from ethics officials.
Additional issues noted by Phillips include limited funding to train all of the city’s approximately 10,500 employees, and there is no recourse for employees not doing the training. The department is on track to train 10% of them by the year’s end, but has plans to bolster online training in the new year to reach more workers, she said. Currently there is one person who conducts in-person training — though some online training components do currently exist. The board’s budget grew from approximately $600,000 to $900,000 this 2025-2026 fiscal year, but a decrease is expected next year, Phillips said.
Advisory opinions like the one issued to Sheffield, meanwhile, require guidance from the agency’s attorney, who is appointed by the city’s Law Department currently overseen by Mallett. Phillips said she has advocated for the board to hire its own legal counsel, but those efforts are at a standstill.
First ethics test as mayor-elect
When news of Sheffield’s relationship with McKinney broke the week before the Nov. 4 election, her office initially falsely stated that she did not vote on any contracts for McKinney when they were together, with Chief of Staff Brian White saying: “This dates back to 2019, when Council President Sheffield was already voting to deny all demolition contracts, including those involving Gayanga, due to concerns about the demolition program at that time.”
Sheffield only voted no on some contracts for the company, the Free Press found in its review of online council records.
White has declined to specify when Sheffield’s romantic relationship with McKinney started and ended, telling the Free Press “that’s her personal life.” Sheffield is currently engaged to someone else.
McKinney, meanwhile, became a major donor to her mayoral bid, contributing more than $13,000 to the Sheffield campaign and the Detroit Next Political Action Committee that supported her. A Sheffield campaign spokesperson previously told the Free Press it returned at least one McKinney donation after his suspension from the demo program, which was reflected in a campaign finance report ahead of the election.
Sheffield’s prior votes for McKinney’s company appeared to have little bearing on the mayoral election, which she won in a landslide.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Ramon Caraballo, a 50-year-old voter who cast his ballot for Sheffield at Greater Grace Temple, told the Free Press on Election Day. “They all do something, but I’m not going to hold that against her.”
“I didn’t see any issues,” said Tim Flintoff, a 44-year-old Sheffield voter and architect whose firm does affordable housing design.
Government ethics experts, however, said Sheffield should recuse herself Tuesday from deciding whether to let McKinney’s company back into the demolition program.
“It’s a nuanced decision and a complex decision for those who are involved in the city’s decision-making process on this,” said Speers. “The public needs to be assured no matter which way the decision goes that it was made on the merit, not based on special influence.”
Detroit Free Press staff writer Clara Hendrickson contributed reporting.
Violet Ikonomova is an investigative reporter at the Free Press focused on government and police accountability in Detroit. Contact her atvikonomova@freepress.com.