The Firm's Biggest Client
You are a senior planner at a 12-person consulting firm. For three years you worked as a planner for the City of Marston (pop. 74,000), where you drafted the mixed-use overlay that now governs the 46-acre Ridgeway property. You left the city 20 months ago. Your firm has been retained by Ridgeway Partners to prepare their rezoning application and environmental review. Ridgeway accounts for 31% of the firm's annual billings, and the principal has told you privately that losing the account would mean laying off two staff. The city's planning director, who was your supervisor and remains a professional reference for you, emails to ask whether you will serve as the city's reviewer on the file.
1. Before you begin work for Ridgeway, what must you do, and why?
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Separate three distinct issues, because they have different remedies.
Prior public employment. Having worked for Marston is not an automatic bar, and 20 months is long enough that a categorical prohibition is unlikely to apply. But you personally drafted the standard the application will be judged against. You should not accept any assignment that requires you to evaluate or certify your own prior work product, and you should expect the city to exclude you from its review.
Financial interest of the firm. A revenue concentration of 31% is an interest that a reasonable person could believe might influence your professional judgment. The Rules of Conduct in the AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct require disclosure of financial or personal interests that could impair judgment rather than an automatic refusal of the assignment. So the obligation is transparency, not abdication - but it is an obligation, not a courtesy.
Timing and form. Do it in writing and before work starts: a dated disclosure memo to the client and to the city describing your prior role, the scope of what you drafted, and the firewall you propose (another staff member handles any analysis of the overlay itself). If the situation still feels ambiguous, request an advisory opinion from the AICP Ethics Officer - the process exists precisely for close calls.
What you may not do is decide unilaterally that the conflict is small enough to skip the disclosure.
2. The planning director asks whether you will be the city's reviewer on the file. Write your response and explain the reasoning behind it.
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The answer is no, and the reason is role confusion rather than wrongdoing.
Your firm represents the applicant. A consultant to the applicant cannot simultaneously serve as the local government's reviewer of that same application; the two duties run in opposite directions, and the arrangement would taint the city's record regardless of how careful your analysis was.
A good response does four things:
- Corrects the premise directly. State that you are Ridgeway's consultant, not the city's reviewer, and that you want to make sure that is unambiguous in the file.
- Discloses the prior employment in the same message, with dates and a description of what you drafted, so the director is not learning it later from someone else.
- Offers the legitimate alternative. You can be the applicant's point of contact, produce a complete and well-documented submittal, and respond to staff comments in writing within agreed turnaround times. Being scrupulously responsive is both good practice and good ethics.
- Declines adjacent work. If the city later asks your firm for third-party review of anything touching Ridgeway, that also has to be declined.
There is a strong temptation to be flattered by the request and to treat it as a compliment about your local knowledge. It is instead a signal that the roles need to be clarified in writing, on the record, before anyone relies on them.
3. The principal asks you to keep your prior city role 'in the background' so the application reads as fresh analysis. How do you respond?
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Refuse, and make the refusal about risk as well as ethics, because that is what will land.
Ethically: deliberately failing to disclose an interest that might influence judgment is precisely the conduct the Code's rules are written to prevent. Keeping a material fact 'in the background' is not an omission of trivia; it is a decision to let decision-makers rely on an incomplete picture.
Practically: concealed prior involvement is the single easiest thing for an opponent to find. It converts a routine rezoning into a due-process challenge, gives the city a reason to reopen or defer the hearing, exposes the firm to a complaint and reputational damage far exceeding one account, and puts the principal's own professional standing at risk. The disclosure you are proposing costs a paragraph; the concealment costs the project.
Then solve the principal's real problem. The principal is worried about revenue, not about disclosure. Offer the workable structure: assign a different project manager to the file, keep yourself as technical support on drainage and site design (areas you did not draft), and put the disclosure in writing. If the firm truly cannot take the job without misrepresenting your role, the answer is that the firm should not take the job.
Do not let the layoff pressure reframe this as a loyalty test. Financial pressure is a reason the stakes are high; it is not a justification for the conduct.