Ethics Program Ideas from a Small Town in Vermont

Ethics problems and the need for ethics programs are the stuff of cities and, perhaps, larger towns, or so most people think. In small towns, everyone knows everyone else, and people can't get away with unethical conduct. And as for corruption, there simply aren't enough zeros in the town's budget. There's not much to learn from small towns, in terms of municipal ethics. Right?

Middletown Springs, Vermont is a town of 823 (2000 census), and yet its town meeting voted on a proposed conflicts of interest ordinance this month. It was rejected by a vote of 188 to 148 (note that that's 40% of the town's population voting, which must be nearly all the adults who could make it on a cold winter day).

This ordinance had one fascinating feature: a five-member ethics commission selected by lottery. Yes, by lottery. Shades of Shirley Jackson's classic story 'The Lottery,' where the small town lottery chooses who will stone someone to death. But isn't that, effectively, how juries are chosen?

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

A lottery would be a good way to ensure an ethics commission's independence. In larger towns and cities, the lottery might not include everyone. Public requests for non-government volunteers could be made, and only those names would be considered for selection. It's a thought.

In a small town, one nice thing is that the voters can be asked why they voted the way they did, informally and usefully. The woman who petitioned for the ordinance did just that, according to an article in the Rutland Herald. Some people found the language confusing (this would be true of nearly all ethics laws). Some people worried that the ordinance would lead to lawsuits against the town (and this does happen occasionally, when unscrupulous and deep-pocketed respondents are brought before an ethics commission). Some people didn't like the idea of townspeople ruling on conflict of interest complaints (which is one argument for doing this at the state level, as many states do, so that it isn't so personal).

These are complaints worth thinking about, and worth learning to respond to right up front.

Middletown Springs' post-vote plan shows a great deal of common sense. The petitioner worked on the ordinance to satisfy people's concerns, and now they are talking about having a brainstorming session about it, with representatives from all the town's organizations, in and out of government, and an out-of-town facilitator to keep the meeting on track. An ethics law should not be something that comes up, gets shot down, and then disappears for a few years until there is a scandal and some other reformer picks it up and tries again. It should be the center of a town-wide discussion of the ethical environment it wants and how to achieve it.

The town's stated goal in considering an ethics ordinance was to heal some of the rifts in town. Many people said after the meeting, 'while people in town might not come to agree, they could come to trust each other.' The chair of the Select Board said, 'I would hope this may be the beginning of an era where we are more open as a community and more respectful to one another.'

I think we have a lot to learn from small towns like this one in Vermont.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics