The state’s ethics board Monday approved spending up to $10,000 for an outside attorney to look into three prohibited campaign contributions for $250 that led board Chairman Kenneth Bernhard to resign March 4.<\/p>\n
Lawyer Jill Hartley of Hartford, once special counsel to the former State Ethics Commission, will be paid $295 an hour under a personal services agreement approved Monday by the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board in a 5-1 vote. Hartley’s paralegal would make $110 an hour under the agreement that extends to June 30.<\/p>\n
Hartley also would recommend the amount of any fine that might be imposed on Bernhard, a former Republican state legislator from Westport.<\/p>\n
In looking for an outside lawyer, board members have said they want to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest that might arise if they handled the case of their former colleague themselves. Riley, the lone dissenter in Monday’s vote, thought it would be better to retain a law professor than a private attorney.<\/p>\n
Bernhard, who is a lawyer himself, has said he was unaware that state laws prohibit ethics board members from making campaign contibutions when he made three adding up to $250 in 2008. At the time, he was he was on the board but not yet chairman. The donations included one for $100 to the exploratory campaign committee of Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, and two to GOP state legislative candidates, one of them Bernhard’s law partner.<\/p>\n
Rell has said that Bernhard “made the appropriate decision” by resigning.<\/p>\n
Board members Monday asked that Hartley make a report at their scheduled April 22 meeting.<\/p>\n
When Bernhard quit, he said he board’s work would be impeded by the continuing controversy over the contributions. Bernhard has said he expects to be fined for the violations but called them “technical,” “inadvertent,” and “not conduct which can be characterized as unethical.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The state’s ethics board Monday approved spending up to $10,000 for an outside attorney to look into three prohibited campaign contributions for $250 that led board Chairman Kenneth Bernhard to resign March 4. Lawyer Jill Hartley of Hartford, once special counsel to the former State Ethics Commission, will be paid $295 an hour under a personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}