Sorry to see you go.

That was the message from the Bainbridge Island City Council this week in response to the resignation of four of the five members of the city of Bainbridge Island’s Ethics Board.

In a letter sent Monday to Mayor Leslie Schneider, the four members of the board criticized the council’s recent revisions to the city’s Ethics Program and said the changes “stifles citizen complaints and reduces the role of the Ethics Board to administrative gatekeeper.”

The letter was signed by Ethics Board Chairwoman Suzanne Keel-Eckmann, and Ethic Board Members Ingrid Billies, Maradel Gale and Brian Strully.

The letter noted that last year was jam-packed with ethics complaints filed against members of the Bainbridge city council.

“2019 was a sad year for the city of Bainbridge Island, its Ethics Board and its citizens,” the letter said. “It was a year with a record number of ethics complaints filed against councilmembers.”

The four members said the Ethics Board dedicated their expertise, time and energy on applying the city’s ethics code, “and protecting the public’s interest in full disclosure of conflicts of interest, and promoting ethical behavior.”

“The council’s response was not to address the behaviors leading to these complaints but to challenge the integrity of the Ethics Board, in some cases to attack members of the Ethics Board, and to draft a new Ethics Program that stifles citizen complaints and reduces the role of the Ethics Board to administrative gatekeeper.”

The letter also recounted the review of the city’s Ethics Program that has been underway since April 2019, and noted how members of the Ethics Board worked cooperatively to improve the ethics program and sent letters on the proposed changes.

The four members aid the “letters were not acknowledged and perhaps never read.”

The new program, they added, included changes that the members could not support.

The “final assault,” they said, was a “sunset provision” that would require the council to renew the program after one year.

“We believe this gives the council a simple and silent way to end this inconvenient program by doing nothing,” the four said in their letter. “And given the long deliberation taken by [the] city council to just agree on the current program, we would expect this clause to be imposed.”

“The Ethics Board is proud of its work,” the letter concluded. “We have rendered fair, objective and thoughtfully reasoned ethical opinions. We have served this city honorably, with courage and dignity. We have diligently and carefully applied the tenets of the previous Ethics Program, serving as a non-judicial body of peers to which citizens can voice their concerns.

“We believe this new program adopted by [the] city council is ill-conceived and ill-advised and puts both the citizens and the city as risk. As a result, the signatories below, current members of the Ethics Board, are compelled to resign,” the letter said.

The Ethics Board has five members and only one, Jennifer Hodges, did not sign the letter.

Copies of the Jan. 27 letter were also sent to the Bainbridge council, city manager, and city attorney.

Hodges, the sole remaining member of Ethics Board, asked the council at their meeting this week to appoint new members to the board. Another six are needed, due to recent changes that increased the size of the advisory board from five to seven.

Mayor Leslie Schneider, at the close of Tuesday’s council meeting, read a letter she was planning to send to the former board members.

The letter said councilmembers “are immensely saddened to see your resignations from the Ethics Board.”

“You served honorably in the face of a record number of ethics complaints and a great deal of pressure,” Schneider said. “You stood for our core values.”

Their critiques of the revision to the Ethics Program reflected the board members’ “thoughtfulness and deep personal experience” with the program, Schneider continued.

She added that the Ethics Program was more “than what you signed up for,” and Schneider thanked them for the service.

Councilman Joe Deets, who was the chairman of the Ethics Board for two years before joining the council, said it “really hurt” to see the resignations happen.

“I am saddened myself. And frankly shocked, and disappointed,” Deets said.

Councilman Kol Medina said he hoped “great people” would volunteer for the Ethics Board.

People who might be interested in joining the Ethics Board shouldn’t look at the transition the board is going through as a “negative experience that you wouldn’t want to be a part of,” Medina said.

Medina added that he was hopeful the new Ethics Program would work really well and the new board will have a positive and meaningful experience.