All of the various sexual harassment allegations against John Falcicchio provide a handy roadmap for how high-level government employees shouldn’t behave. It only took Mayor Muriel Bowser and her staff about seven months to spell that out with a new policy.

Bowser’s new order on sexual harassment, released Tuesday, reads like a list of mea culpas for Falcicchio’s actions before his ouster earlier this year. In particular, it takes the big new step of banning relationships between employees who work in the same chain of command, and prohibits supervisors from giving preferential treatment to anyone based on those relationships. Basically, it bans all of the things Falcicchio was accused of doing by two employees back in March (but which the mayor’s internal investigation didn’t examine).

And then there’s more strict language prohibiting officials from harassing government contractors. The provision happens to align very closely with the accusations a woman seeking government business made against Falcicchio this June.

Plus, there are new, more stringent standards for how agencies designate “sexual harassment officers” who can accept reports of harassment from District workers and new reporting requirements for how the city tracks such accusations. The employees to accuse Falcicchio initially ran into trouble when they found that there wasn’t any sexual harassment officer in place at the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, which Falcicchio led. So they were forced to go directly to the mayor’s attorneys.

And if any other senior government staffers (including the mayor, city administrator, the chief of staff, and all deputy mayors) are accused of sexual harassment, according to Bowser’s new order, then the city’s inspector general will review the matter and can order an independent investigation—authority that used to lie with the mayor’s lawyers. Bowser firmly resisted Council legislation ordering precisely this outcome in Falcicchio’s case. 

“We have to make clear the values of the District: that we’re going to do everything possible to have a sexual harassment free workforce,” Bowser told reporters Wednesday. “At the end of the day, people have to do the right thing, and if they don’t there will be consequences.”

All of this stuff seems to Loose Lips like common sense change for Bowser to embrace. Some of the revisions are the equivalent of policy lay-ups and amount to updates of language that has since fallen out of favor among attorneys working on these issues. For instance, the revised policy removes a requirement that misbehavior be “severe and pervasive” to qualify as harassment, a change the Council passed into a different law last year. The Washington Post found in its investigation of these issues a few weeks ago that many employees have run into trouble proving harassment allegations based on that language.

So, if all this is so simple, that invites the question: Why now? Many of these issues have been debated among D.C. politicos since Falcicchio resigned seven months ago.

District officials (who would only speak about all this to reporters on background, much to the chagrin of the D.C. press corps’ broadcast representatives) say they’ve been working iteratively to revise the policy since the mayor first issued an order on harassment in 2017. But it’s hard to discount the influence of growing pressure from the media and the Council in spurring some movement. 

The mayor’s office told both LL and Axios just last week that there was no timeline for the release of the new policies; officials insisted their decision to release the order a few days later was unrelated to any public pressure and bristled at any suggestion otherwise. They argue that it took quite a bit of time to hash out the policy’s vagaries, and they didn’t want to promise its release only to walk it back in the face of new hurdles. That may be so, but LL would forgive readers for feeling a bit of whiplash, at the least, if not questioning Bowser’s continued missteps in communicating clearly about her response to this scandal.

But those are questions of public relations that primarily concern Wilson Building gossips like LL. More importantly, this order does seem to provide more clarity for employees experiencing harassment in the D.C. government. 

The Post found that employees would report harassment only to have supervisors not take them seriously, or have legitimate grievances dismissed as cases of “mixed messages” between employees. Bowser’s new order seeks to alleviate such problems by offering more frequent trainings for supervisors and ensuring that harassment officers are better qualified to review these complaints. Similarly, it also allows agency heads to order a new review of a harassment officer’s recommendations if they disagree.

Bowser administration officials also said that every agency has now been assigned a sexual harassment officer, despite those earlier gaps, and the order now requires the public posting and widespread dissemination of that information going forward. 

The order’s requirement for more tracking of harassment cases (and any legal settlements stemming from them) should also ensure more transparency around these matters. Previously, it was up to each Council committee to ask agencies about this information during annual oversight hearings, and the level of detail of those responses often varied (if lawmakers remembered to ask at all). Of course, LL will be watching closely to see whether the administration actually lives up to the order’s requirements on this front, considering it promised to do similar work back in 2017 and never finished it, even amid criticism from D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson. 

The problem with all of these changes as they relate to Falcicchio, of course, is that they’re about the future, not the past. It’s a positive step, for instance, that D.C. agencies will need to collect information on which employees are currently involved in relationships and try to arrange reassignments if those relationships could involve any irreconcilable power imbalances or conflicts of interest. But that does nothing to combat the problems identified by the employees who accused Falcicchio, since there could be ripple effects if he indeed gave preferential treatment to people who accepted his advances and punished those who didn’t.

That is a question that only further investigation can answer, and that is where the Council and the inspector general’s reviews of these questions will come in. 

Bowser has, finally, done the bare minimum in taking steps to make sure something like the Falcicchio scandal can’t happen again. It remains incumbent on oversight entities (or perhaps prosecutors) to uncover the exact scope of Falcicchio’s actions, which remains unknown more than seven months later. LL suspects that only that sort of work, when combined with these reforms advanced by Bowser, can truly give employees confidence that high-level harassers won’t be tolerated by D.C. leaders.