Press and Public Comment
Statement of Ethics Matters
In recent weeks you have passed 8 amendments to the County Ethics Law. These amendments bring our County closer to the minimum standard required by the State, but we don’t seem to be there yet.
The process of getting a decent ethics code has been long and difficult. During the past four years, our ethics law has gone from the old law, the weakest ethics law in
The Counsel to the State Ethics Commission reminded you earlier this month that there is an important Conflicts provision remaining to be addressed. This provision prohibits a government official from owning or being employed by a business that has a contract or is negotiating a contract with that official’s government agency. For example, the Head of the Roads Department can’t be contracting to lease equipment for County use from an equipment rental company he owns.
A provision prohibiting this kind of conflict was present in earlier proposed versions of the law and was even a part of the old weak law. However, this prohibition was eliminated from the law that Mr. Cassell introduced and you passed.
The letter from the State reminds you that they wrote last July questioning the absence of this provision. The State notes “that there has been no response . . . regarding these questions.” The State’s Counsel even helpfully supplied language for an amendment addressing this conflicts situation, which, he said, if included in the code along with the recent amendments, would likely mean State approval of the County Ethics Law. Please address this important provision so we can have an ethics law that at least meets the minimum requirement.
Also, you ignored the State’s recent recommendation to give our Ethics Commission the right to obtain relevant evidence and call knowledgeable witnesses when making decisions about violations of the law. Otherwise uncooperative respondents stonewall the Commission and possibly legitimate complaints must be dismissed for lack of evidence, and so the law can not be enforced. To be worth the paper it is written on, an ethics law must be enforceable. Please reconsider the State’s recommendation.
Ethics Matters has spent more than a year in pursuit of an ethics code that, at the least, meets the minimum standard. It has been a long and frustrating process - and we still are not there.
What Ethics Matters, and so many citizens, really would like is a code that does more than just meet the minimum - a code that government employees and the public at large can be proud of. But for the moment, we are resigned to first things first. Let’s at least get to the point where we can get State approval for meeting the minimum requirement for County ethics codes.