A bill before the General Assembly has moved through its latest hurdle, the Appropriations Committee, and is now awaiting a vote on the Senate floor. It wouldn’t be surprising if SB 289, AN ACT CONCERNING THE ONLINE SUBMISSION AND POSTING OF STATEMENTS OF FINANCIAL INTERESTS, succumbed to a similar fate of many of last year’s ethics reform bills. Not only is this bill unlikely to pass because of its content but it also appears doomed because of the amendments which have been filed by the Republican leadership on the bill.
SB 289 requires that the statements of financial interest, or SFIs, that are filed by public officials disclosing sources of income, securities, properties, etc., be filed electronically with the Office of State Ethics in an effort to provide transparency and to eliminate conflicts of interest. Until recently, those statements had been filed on paper and only in the last few years were the forms made available electronically. This bill would make the electronic filing mandatory and would require that the information they contain be made available to the public via the Internet. Until now, that information could only be obtained via a Freedom of Information request.
There’s a lot going on here. Transparency is good, right? We want to know what our elected and appointed officials’ potential conflicts might be. We want to know it sooner, rather than later. But does the public need to know it all? Do we need to know the names of their kids? Their home addresses? What if there is a divorce and the assets are being divided? Should that be public knowledge?
Now we add the layer of the Republican amendments which could make this all moot. Last year, and again in 2010, they’re adding amendments to all ethics legislation that establishes a bi-partisan legislative ethics panel. This is in reaction to investigations into wrongdoing by Senators Gaffey and Crisco, two Democrats. They want equanimity after Senator Lou DeLuca was driven from office. But the question remains, can the legislature police itself? Will an ethics panel be effective? Can the watchdog agency that is the OSE perform that role? The Republican tactic may be just that - a stalling tactic - and it may end up killing ethics reform again this year.
Tags: bi-partisan ethics panel, ethics panel, Office of State Ethics, SFI, statement of financial interest, transparency
