Ethics Self-Regulation Exposed by Ethics Complaint

Sometimes even a wrongheaded ethics complaint can do good, by showing how wrongheaded a town's government ethics program is.

According to an editorial in The Day this week, the head of a local political party, Independence for Montville, filed an ethics complaint alleging that a former council member who owns a hot dog stand pushed to have the town's street vendor law changed so that street vendors could be 500 feet rather than a mile (5280 feet) from a competing business. Unless there were a law prohibiting former council members from lobbying for their own interests, there would be no ethics violation.

The problem was that, in Montville (a town of 20,000 best known for hosting the Mohegan Sun casino), it is the town council that handles ethics complaints. As the editors recognize, "One party is going to be in charge, which means the public and those filing complaints are likely to look skeptically at the council's ethical rulings, suspecting favoritism, even if perhaps it is not there." Even if a local legislative body is nonpartisan, or evenly split, there is still the problem of members judging their colleagues regarding issues that affect them all, so that by letting off one colleague, they are creating (or seen to be creating) a precedent to let themselves off in the future.

When the council correctly dismissed the complaint, the complainant upped the ante by filing complaints against five of the seven council members — all members of the majority party — for mishandling the complaint. When the council chair asked the town attorney for advice, the complainant filed an ethics complaint against the town attorney, as well, arguing that he had a conflict of interest because he had been appointed by the council.

It appears that the complainant was acting for partisan purposes and lacked a true understanding of government ethics. But the editorial rightly blames the council for "inviting chaos and undermining government credibility" by handling ethics complaints itself. The editors call for a separate, bipartisan ethics board.

25 towns in Connecticut have ethics codes that do not create an independent ethics commission (many others do not even have an ethics code). Municipalities across the country allow their councils, city or county attorneys, and/or supervisors to enforce their ethics codes. As the editorial recognizes, no one trusts this self-enforcement, because government ethics involves officials' personal interests and relationships, and the officials who would decide how to deal with these interests and relationships have their own personal interests and relationships with these officials, which include party relationships, but go far beyond them.

Those who are subject to a government ethics program should not enforce it. Ethics commissions are citizen oversight boards. Officials are not citizens, and cannot oversee themselves and maintain the public's trust. Sometimes it takes a partisan, misguided individual to show a community the problems that accompany ethics self-regulation.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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