The Senate on Tuesday approved the creation of a State Ethics Commission that was roundly condemned as too weak and took so long to sort out that the House likely won’t have time to consider it this year.
Supporters, including Sen. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, said the Senate bill, S.184, was better than nothing but a far cry from the original idea.
Initially, Pollina proposed a commission that would have a staff, including investigators. The bill that passed calls for a part-time director with no investigators, who will essentially review and then refer complaints to another state agency, including the attorney general.
“It got whittled away without a doubt, and it’s much weaker than what we started with,” Pollina said. “Some of that was for financial reasons, which are questionable, I guess, and some of it was because of hesitancy of members of the Senate to go with something stronger.”
The bill passed unanimously, though several senators grumbled during the debate. Sen. Robert Starr, D-Essex-Orleans, gave a weak yes and shook his head when the roll was called. Earlier during the debate, he questioned whether some of the measures were necessary in a small state where everyone’s business is known.
“I think it’s a pretty big pile of mud,” he said.
Final Senate approval is expected Wednesday. Then the bill will go to the House, where the chair of the key committee that will review it said her schedule is packed until the planned early May adjournment.
The State Ethics Commission would have jurisdiction over elected state officials — including the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, auditor of accounts, treasurer and secretary of state — as well as high-level state employees, including agency secretaries and department commissioners. Conflicts of interest are of particular concern.
In addition, those officials, as well as candidates running for statewide office and the Legislature, would be required to disclose income sources of $10,000 or more and boards and associations on which they serve.
Senators and House members would be governed by their own ethics boards, which lawmakers said the state constitution requires. The only provision of the bill that would affect lawmakers is a prohibition on lobbying the Vermont Legislature for one year after leaving office. A similar prohibition would be placed on high-level state employees.
Earlier in the day, after months of committee debate, the Senate established its own internal ethics commission, which also requires financial disclosure.
“A lot of folks consider what we’re doing here an unnecessary burden,” Pollina said. “People are not going to want to run for office because ‘I don’t want to disclose who I am or what I do,’ and I just think it’s a really small price to pay for the privilege of being here and representing Vermonters.”
“We’re very good at passing laws that affect other people, but we’re always very hesitant to pass laws that actually affect the way we do business,” he said.
Paul Burns, the executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, was particularly unhappy the Senate “punted” on whether the State Ethics Commission should prohibit “pay for play” — where a campaign contributor gives a donation in hopes of winning a state contract, as was alleged against Attorney General William Sorrell. He wasn’t charged with violating any law.
“It took the Senate a very long time to accomplish what in the end is very little,” Burns said. “It gets us in the game, and that’s something, but we were hoping for more significant reform.”
On the “pay for play” measure, which a Senate committee removed from the bill before it went to the floor, Burns said: “They essentially punted on that question. And frankly along the way, they flipped more frequently than the U.S. Gymnastics Team. They were literally in favor of it, opposed to it, in favor of it, opposed to it and now punting it to the Ethics Commission.”
The five-member commission and the part-time executive director are to study the “pay for play” issue and make a recommendation how to deal with it next year. Burns said it would have been more appropriate to have a Legislative committee decide policy issue than the commission.
Secretary of State Jim Condos last week criticized the Senate bill and said it was toothless without a full-time executive director and investigative team. Senators who worked on the bill said that would have carried too large a price tag, about $650,000 a year. In the end, they hope this measure costs less than $100,000 a year.
One of Condos’ biggest disappointments was that the commission would not be dealing with complaints against municipal officials, which he said were the source of most of the questions his office receives. The Senate Government Operations Committee instead decided to have the Vermont League of Cities and Towns encourage municipalities to adopt conflict of interest codes.
Whether the weakened version of the bill gets reviewed and voted on by the House is up in air. Donna Sweaney, D-Windsor, the chair of House Government Operations, said Tuesday her committee was flat out for the next few weeks with charter change proposals, including a controversial measure involving Berlin Pond.
“I’m not sure I can battle it out in the next few weeks,” Sweaney said. “I’m not sure we’re going to have enough time.”
Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell admitted the Senate put a time squeeze on the House. He said he spoke to Speaker Shap Smith on Monday.
“The only way, quite frankly, is if there is overwhelming support for it within the House, and I’m not going to lie to you, I think it’s going to be really tough,” Campbell said. “It’s going to be a really tough row to hoe, and if that’s the case, what needs to be done is that it needs to be one of the first things that’s addressed at the beginning of next year.”
He said the only other option would be to keep the Legislature in session several weeks longer than planned, at a big cost.
All legislation that does not pass both the House and Senate must start from scratch in the next biennium.
Under the Senate proposal, complaints to the State Ethics Commission would be received by the executive director, who would review them and refer them to either the attorney general — if the complaint is criminal in nature or involves a campaign finance allegation — or to the Human Resources Department in the case of state employees.
Once a year, the commission would send a report to the Legislature describing the number and nature of the complaints.
The five members would serve staggered three-year terms. They would be appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Vermont affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Commission, the Vermont Bar Association and the League of Women Voters.
Several senators said they hoped the charge of the commission and the job of the executive director could be changed depending on the number and types of complaints that come in.
“It is less about enforcement than about transparency and prevention,” Pollina said.
Sen. Jeanette White, D-Windham, chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that when the bill started in her committee, the commission was 80 percent enforcement and 20 percent training and education. She said she hoped the version the Senate passed had flipped those percentages.
