Last year, Christina Sivret was invited to speak at a national conference by the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, DC., a nonpartisan government watchdog. Director of the State Ethics Commission since 2021, Sivret said she was proud to represent Vermont as a beacon among states where ethics is at the forefront.
This year she was asked to participate again by the same organization for the opposite reason, because of recent rollbacks to ethics reforms in Vermont and elsewhere across the country, she said, but decided not to attend.
The Vermont State Ethics Commission was established by the Legislature in 2018 as an independent, non-partisan agency to promote standards of ethical conduct in state government. A 2024 law gave it more purview over ethical standards for local governments, but the commission stopped offering services to municipalities in May, according to an announcement on the website, “due to lack of staffing.” It is continuing to accept complaints related to state government.
For three and a half years, the office has had one part-time administrative assistant and one part-time executive director. “During that time, our workload has tripled with no corresponding increase in resources. For this reason, continuing to provide the same level of service has become an impossibility,” the announcement reads.
The stall comes just months after the commission began to issue guidance to municipal officials on handling local ethics complaints. The 2024 law that created a municipal code of ethics made the requirements effective this year, which led to a flood of queries and complaints since January, Sivret said.
Now municipalities in Vermont have nowhere to turn for ethics violations and complaints but can continue to access online training.
“It signals a lack of support for ethics accountability in the state,” said Sivret. “We’re talking about a state that’s already very far behind when it comes to an actual ethics accountability framework. I’m talking decades behind most other states that started working on this after Watergate.”
That’s a problem, according to William Stuono, a planning commission member in Charlotte who has previously advocated for the commission to have more funding and power.
“The biggest problem with lack of funding of the Ethics Commission is that it now leaves investigation entirely up to the communities themselves, and has no ‘independent’ way to review complaints,” he wrote in an email. “This creates a ‘fox guarding the henhouse’ scenario, and therefore trust in the process of filing complaints is entirely eliminated.”
Sivret said the commission has been understaffed since Gov. Phil Scott signed Vermont’s first-ever statewide code of ethics for public officials in 2022. Other states with comparable responsibilities have multiple full-time staff members, she said, such as Rhode Island, which has 12 staffers listed online, including multiple attorneys.
“We have repeatedly and aggressively advocated for additional staffing from the Legislature during the past two legislative sessions,” said Sivret, who is a lawyer.
For fiscal year 2026, Sivret once again requested funding for two additional staff members — a legal counsel to primarily provide state government services, and a staff attorney to primarily provide advice and training to municipal officials.
“These positions are necessary so that the Ethics Commission can meet the increasing demand for its services associated with the passage of the State Code of Ethics in 2022, and Act 171 in 2024,” she wrote in a March 13 letter to the Vermont Senate Committee on Appropriations.
The letter outlined the commission being “severely under-resourced” while the need for its statutory responsibilities and services statewide continues to grow, not unlike the situation faced by the Human Rights Commission last year.
From January through early May, the commission received 55 written complaints and 61 complaint inquiries, compared to 23 written complaints and 47 inquiries for all of 2024, according to Sivret. The majority this year came from municipalities.
Last year the state passed an ethics bill in an effort to create uniform ethical standards in local government. Advocates pointed out then that Vermont ranks poorly nationwide for the strength of its government ethics laws and is last among its New England neighbors.
The bill expanded the commission’s reach by allowing it to investigate complaints but without any enforcement powers beyond issuing warnings and recommendations. It also required municipalities to enact their own ethics procedures to field local complaints.
All in all, it was “a ‘baby step’ to address the well-documented ethical issues in Vermont,” said Stuono.
“Since then the legislature enacted a new bill to exempt the legislature itself from investigation by the Ethics Commission. They also have refused to fund the Ethics Commission, which is understaffed and overwhelmed with complaints,” he wrote in an email.
The path to ethics reform in Vermont has been murky and riddled with delays, according to advocates for reform. After years of discussion and a F grade from the Center for Public Integrity on ethics enforcement, Vermont was one of the last states to establish an ethics commission in 2017. Set up as a five-member commission with a part-time executive director to handle complaints related to the ethical conduct of public officials, it had no powers to investigate or levy punishment.
Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said on Tuesday that he doesn’t think the commission was designed to succeed.
“It’s like a plane on the tarmac,” he said. “It looks good but without any investigatory powers it lacks engines. And without any enforcement authority, it lacks landing gear. And so it might look like a plane that could get you someplace but this plane is never going to get off the ground.”
After pushing for ethics reform in Vermont for years, Burns was disillusioned about the way it played out. The commission was “worthless,” he said in 2020, providing lawmakers “a fig leaf of protection.”
In 2019, the year after it was established, the commission decided to withdraw its own “advisory opinion” critical of Gov. Phil Scott. The commission’s first executive director, Brian Leven, quit because he believed the commission had gone too far and exceeded its authority in issuing that opinion.
Notwithstanding the bumpy start, many in the state continue to advocate for the need to bolster the commission and its work. Some, like Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky, P/D-Chittenden Central, fear that political will and money needed for a high-functioning state ethics commission is not likely to materialize in a year that could see a budget deficit.
“It’s incredibly problematic that we’re not prioritizing funding to our ethics commission,” said Vyhovsky. “That’s not because I think there’s a widespread problem with ethical violations but I think that the transparency and support of a robust ethics commission helps to build trust in government.”
The rollbacks are not a good look for Vermont, said Sivret.
“We’re heading down a very negative path that’s following a very negative national trend at a time when, I would be comfortable saying, the vast majority of Vermonters do not want to see this,” she said.
