It’s been more than eight months since Langley greenlighted the creation of an ethics board, yet the group is still without a single member.

After spending much of 2013 working toward an ethics manual for the City of Langley, the founding group of volunteers recommended a board be formed. Langley’s ethics board was supposed to be like any of its other citizen boards in that it would have appointed members, but it would not meet regularly. Its main reason for convening would be to lead trainings and to resolve or review ethics violations. In that way, the ethics board would be akin to the city’s civil service commission that meets only to recommend the hiring of police officers.

The city sought applicants and members by August 2014. Since then, only two people have applied, Mayor Fred McCarthy said. One applicant withdrew, and another submitted an incomplete application.

Part of the reason may have been the unique rigor of the application. Anyone seeking to join the city’s ethics board had to submit five letters of recommendation attesting to the applicant’s ethical behavior. None of the other citizen boards have this requirement.

“If they’re going to make judgments about a person’s legal behavior, ethical behavior, they should be above reproach,” McCarthy said.

“I thought the expectation was reasonable,” he added. “I didn’t intend to select anybody until they met that criteria.”

Forming an ethics commission came on the heels of McCarthy’s predecessor, Larry Kwarsick, being charged and pleading guilty to one count of false report of a public official for falsifying a document when he was Langley’s planning director in 2011. Reeling, the city council led by former councilman Hal Seligson called for the assembly of seven people to write Langley’s code of ethics and craft an ethics training program.

Among them was Ann Medlock, one of the original ethics code drafters. In an email, she said she was not surprised to see that no one had volunteered.

“It’s pretty cheeky to step forward and say, ‘Yes I’m so ethical that I’d like to be on this board,’” she said. Her hope was that City Hall would invite people to join, just as she was.

“If no invitations have gone out to serve on the commission, it’s not surprising that there’s no standing commission,” Medlock added.

McCarthy said that, unlike some other citizen boards, he chose not to directly solicit any members for the ethics board. If he were to be charged with an ethics violation, he did not want to have any semblance of bias from its membership.

“Particularly given our history here, I thought it would be better for it to be objective,” he said.

Since listing the board vacancy in August 2014, the posts have become a bit obscured on the city’s website. Rather than being posted with the other citizen boards, the notice for the Ethics Training and Advisory Board is in the “All news” tab from the home page.

“We just kind of let that die,” said Councilman Bruce Allen, who added that the city had not done a “big job” of posting the vacancies.

Between the time of the original posting of vacancies and now, Langley has become entrenched in a couple of time-consuming and spotlight-worthy projects: Dog House Tavern renovation and marina access/bluff project.

“There’s issues out there that are bigger than that,” Allen said of the ethics board.

Both he and McCarthy acknowledged that the ethics board is an important task ahead of city hall. But neither man was willing to lessen the application requirements in order to fill out the board’s positions.

“I’m open to forming it, if we get people who are willing to submit to some scrutiny, which would come from their peers,” McCarthy said.

“I don’t prefer letting things fade into the sunset, nor do I prefer to have a board that has no interest,” he added.