Ethics Commissions & Administration

Update: December 20, 2012 (see below)

Across the nation, there have been numerous occasions when local government officials oppose disclosure requirements, sometimes even the most minimal ones (for example, the name of an elected official’s employer). Arguments are made about privacy, identity theft, and overweening government. There is talk about rights, but never about obligations.

But the bottom-line argument is that if you require financial disclosure, no one will volunteer for local boards and commissions. This is stated as an immutable fact, although without evidence.

I have written about the need for ethics commissions to go beyond the criminal enforcement paradigm, which limits commissions to determining whether an individual respondent has violated an ethics provision or not. It is hard to find instances of a commission looking at the bigger picture, that is, at the common practices and unwritten rules that underlie an individual's ethical misconduct.

The independence of ethics commissions and their staff is the single most important aspect of a government ethics program.
Who selects the commission members and their staff, and how, colors everything about an ethics program and determines, more than any other factor, whether the public has confidence in the commission's advice and enforcement of an ethics code. So the news from Washington, DC and Atlanta is not good.

Proximity rules are common to local and state government ethics codes nationwide (see my blog post on them from five years ago). They require officials to withdraw from any matter dealing with property within a certain distance of property they own or rent, no matter how many others have property within the same proximity.

Stephen Colbert has been doing a great job satirizing the current federal campaign finance situation. He has especially made a mockery of the Super PAC, a means of allowing individuals and entities to make unlimited contributions to a candidate's campaign under the guise of independent expenditures. Colbert has shown how weak the rules on collaboration are, how the Super PAC is effectively, if not constitutionally, no different than a campaign committee.

The situation of Rose Pak, a power broker for San Francisco's Chinese-American community who was featured a week ago in a New York Times article, raises some interesting questions. A paid consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, she has never held public office.

Can a local ethics commission be lobbied? It's conceivable, especially with respect to recommendations for ethics reform. It is important for an ethics commission to have an ethics code provision or regulation that prohibits ex parte communications relating to any proceeding. But with respect to ethics reform recommendations, the public's input is important, and there would seem to be no reason why a registered lobbyist shouldn't be able to put in her two cents.

Yet another brief has been filed in the Carrigan v. Commission on Ethics of the State of Nevada case, this time the EC's supplemental brief on remand to the Nevada Supreme Court.

Three months ago, I wrote about an ethics commission decision asking for the removal of a Louisville council member, and the start of proceedings in the council to do just that. I noted that the council member's reaction was pure denial and attack on the ethics commission.