Two key legislators say a bill is needed to reverse a recent decision by the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board allowing the nine ethics board members and the 18-member staff of the Office of State Ethics to do volunteer work in political campaigns.
On Dec. 17, the ethics board voted 6-2 to approve a legal opinion that said, for the first time, that the ethics watchdogs now can provide unpaid, volunteer assistance even to candidates who come under their agency’s regulation. But that ruling will not last long if the two co-chairs of the legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee get their way.
“The whole purpose of creating the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board was to have them separated, and to sit in a quasi-judicial capacity,” said state Sen. Gayle Slossberg, D-Milford, committee co-chairwoman. “To now have them involved in partisan politics completely erodes the trust that people will place in the ethics board and its rulings.”
Slossberg said that the committee will be drafting a bill to ban all campaign activities by board members and the ethics office’s staff.
“It looks like this law needs a pretty simple amendment,” said Rep. James Spallone, D-Essex, the committee’s House co-chairman. “I agree with Gayle.”
The issue is the subject of the a Government Watch column in the Sunday Courant. The column can be read by clicking here.
One of the two ethics board members who voted against approving the legal opinion Dec. 17, Dennis Riley of Norwich, told the Courant Friday “there shouldn’t be any political activity on the part of people who are assigned to enforce ethics regulations. It’s just a total watering down of strong ethics laws.”
Here’s the language of the opinion, as approved by the ethics board Dec. 17: “We conclude that [Office of State Ethics] employees and board members may, in their personal capacities, provide ‘uncompensated services … volunteering their time’ for federal, state or municipal campaigns — even if the candidate is subject to the … provisions” of the state ethics laws that the state watchdogs enforce.
The opinion was issued at the request of the Administrative and Residual Employees Union Local 4200, which represents about 10 staff members in the ethics office — lawyers, paralegals and others. The union’s first vice president, Mike Winkler, said he pursued the request after hearing from members inside the agency who were concerned with preserving their rights.
The ethics panel and the office staff at times investigate state government officials and employees for allegedly violating ethics laws, and sometimes they impose fines amounting to thousands of dollars. Slossberg said letting them engage in political campaigns could create an appearance of bias.
So how did the ethics board arrive at the conclusion that volunteer campaign work should be allowed?
It found that although state ethics laws specifically prohibit financial contributions to political campaigns by any “member or employee of the board or Office of State Ethics,” the definition of “contribution” in state election laws does not include volunteer campaign work. The election laws say: “‘Contribution’ does not mean … uncompensated services provided by individuals volunteering their time.”
And so when a staff lawyer at the ethics agency researched the law and prepared the legal opinion for board approval in December, the result was that campaign contributions remained banned but campaign volunteer work would be allowed.
Slossberg, the legislative committee chairwoman, said that when legislators set up the ethics board and staff office in 2005, they did not intend to leave open the possibility that volunteer campaign work would be permitted while contributions were banned. And so, she said, this unintended loophole must be closed.
Legislators might get an idea of how to do that by reading the Massachusetts law that governs the Bay State’s ethics commission. “No member or employee of the commission shall participate in or contribute to the political campaign of any candidate for public office,” the Massachusetts law says.