Local GOPer Files Ethics Complaint Over Nutter's Use of Staffers at Dem Convention
By Mike Dunn
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Members of the Philadelphia GOP today filed a complaint with the city's Board of Ethics over Mayor Nutter's use of tax dollars for staffers who came with him to the Democratic National Convention.
Mayor Nutter went to the convention in Charlotte, NC with three police officers for security and two aides in tow. The administration puts the cost to taxpayers at just under $7,400.
Attorney Matthew Wolfe, a local official with the GOP, has now lodged a complaint about that with the Board of Ethics.
"You can't use public money, government money, taxpayer money for political purposes, and that's what the mayor did here," Wolfe tells KYW Newsradio.
Mark McDonald, a spokesman for he mayor, says Nutter's chief integrity officer has deemed the expenditure appropriate.
"(The mayor) also conducted mayoral business (in Charlotte), and it was appropriate that a couple of staffers be with him for that," McDonald tells KYW Newsradio.
Wolfe says the complaint is only over the use of staffers in Charlotte, not the security detail, which is allowed under the Ethics Code. But he does take question Nutter's need to take three officers:
"He took three police officers for what was, for three days, the safest place on earth."
