The Extent of Disclosure Necessary to Obtain Ethics Advice

According to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Friday, the state ethics board refused to give ethics advice to the Port of South Louisiana regarding whether the hiring of a parish (that is, city) council member would be appropriate, considering that the Port and council work closely together on projects, and the council votes on port-related issues. The reason for the ethics board's refusal, on the advice of counsel, was that the Port would not disclose the council member's name. The reason for the Port's refusal is that it had not yet made its hiring decision and, therefore, the information was confidential (personnel matters are usually confidential).

I am as big as an advocate as there is for full disclosure in the provision of ethics advice. I believe that government officials should be proud to have the public know that they are seeking ethics advice. However, publicly available ethics advice should be redacted so that unnecessary details about officials' private business transactions are not disclosed. For example, no one needs to know how much an official has invested in a company, just that he has an investment in the company.

But in this situation, the council member did not seek ethics advice, so he has nothing to be proud of and has apparently not approved the disclosure of his job application. In this situation, the most important question, with respect to disclosure of the advice that would be given to the port authority, is whether the official's identity is a necessary detail.

I would argue that, especially since the individual seeking the job is himself a government official, his identity is an important, although not a necessary detail. What is most important is that the job applicant is a member of the particular council. Disclosure of which council member sought the job need not be made until the hiring decision has been made.

In the current matter, however, the ethics board's counsel is not talking about disclosure of ethics advice, but rather about the provision of ethics advice. Is it necessary to the provision of ethics advice in this matter that the ethics board know the identity of the council member who applied for the job? It's certainly necessary that it know which council, since it is the relationship between council members and the Port that is central to the matter. But the identity of the particular council member does not matter in the least.

What does matter is that the ethics advice be provided to the entire council and its staff, because it affects all of them. In fact, the advice — or a general advisory opinion that applies the reasoning to a wider range of situations — should be provided to all council members and staff, and all agencies, in the state. This is the kind of advice that could affect dozens or even hundreds of officials and human resources decisions every year.

The ethics board should not refuse to provide advice in this situation. The only alternative to providing the advice immediately would be to have the Port ask the council member for permission to disclose his name to the ethics board. But I don't think that the official's refusal to give such permission should affect what the ethics board does. What it does is primarily for the Port's human resources department, secondarily for the council, and tertiarily for other such departments throughout the state, as well as for officials throughout the state who may find themselves considering a job with a state or local agency that does business with their body or agency.

This is a problem that could be solved by a requirement to seek advice, which I advocate in my book Local Government Ethics Programs. If the council member had a requirement to seek advice before seeking a job with an agency that did business with his council, then the council member would have already disclosed himself to the ethics board, or been required to and failed. If the council member failed to seek advice, then the Port's request for advice would have shown the council member to be in violation, and providing his name to the ethics board would no longer involve a personnel issue, but rather the reporting of an ethics violation. If the council member sought advice and was told it was legal to apply for the job, he would have told the Port, and there would have been no need for the Port to seek advice.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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