Former State Ethics Commission director Dan Mollway suggested it would be interesting to check out what the county ethics commissions are up to. So I decided to take an initial look at what information is readily available. On this first pass, it looks like all the counties are weak in regulating lobbyists, but the State Ethics Commission has had similar problems in that area. I’ll have to circle around at another time to look at recent actions and decisions at the county level.
The Kauai County website makes it easy to find the Board of Ethics page, which includes a list of the county charter provisions (but not links to them), as well as board agendas and minutes. The most recent minutes are for the boards October 12 meeting, so they are up to date.
But I don’t see anything relating to registration and regulation of lobbyists.
And I don’t see anything about lobbyists in a very quick check of the county charter (so I could be missing something).
The problem here is that the State Constitution requires each county to have an ethics code that includes several provisions, including lobbyist registration.
Each code of ethics shall include, but not be limited to, provisions on gifts, confidential information, use of position, contracts with government agencies, post-employment, financial disclosure and lobbyist registration and restriction.
Does the county have lobbyist registration rules tucked away in some other part of county government? Anybody on Kauai want to comment?
Search for the Board of Ethics on the Hawaii County website and you get to a spartan display of three folders containing public documents–agendas, minutes, documents.
The documents folder contains the Code of Ethics, a good first stop. The Hawaii County Code does require lobbyist registration and disclosure, although I don’t see any of those documents posted online.
When I searched for the word “lobbyist,” the system returned links to several sets of minutes as well as the ethics code.
Back in 2005, I see that attorney David Frankel appeared at a Board of Ethics meeting to complain that the lobbyist registration law was not being enforced.
My real concern is that there’s been really no implementation or enforcement of the lobbying law. When I went to the County Clerk’ s office in August, excuse me, in September, to see who was registered, I was shocked to see really, no one’s been registering. Well, one or two people a year, and the people who are at the Council lobbying all the time for those of us who’ve sat there, see at the Council on a regular basis, have not registered.
It looks like a follow-up is in order to see whether things have changed much at all since 2005.
The Honolulu Ethics Commission website provides a number of links.
I clicked on “meeting information,” and got a list of links to minutes that did not display properly, making it difficult to use. It did not provide a list of previous agendas.
There is a listing of prior advisory opinions, and a subject index, which is very useful. Several recent opinions show the commission has done extensive investigations of cases, resulting in detailed public findings and penalties.
A link to “lobbyist information” leads to an annually-updated list of registered lobbyists, which contains the lobbyist’s name and business address (no telephone numbers), as well as the name and address of the client they are representing, but without the name of the person responsible for authorizing the lobbyist or their telephone number.
There is no information provided on lobbying expenditures.
The Board of Ethics has a web page listing commission members, a link to board agendas and minutes, ethics rules and charter provisions, and copies of financial disclosures filed by county officials, both elected and appointed, and candidates in the recent elections.
Meeting minutes are several months behind. The last set of minutes available online as of yesterday was for the August 8, 2012 meeting.
I didn’t see lists of registered lobbyists on the board’s website. Lobbyists are apparently required to register, but do not have to disclose their activities or expenditures.
Ian, thanks for the review of the four county ethics boards. It has been my understanding as well that these boards have been weak in the area of dealing with lobbyists, but this is just a very general statement on my part–and probably relates more to inadequate resources than anything else. All I can recall specifically on the matter is that when I asked Carolyn Stapleton, the director of the Honolulu Ethics Board at the time, in 1992, if she was dealing with lobbyists, her response was that she had no time for that. All of the ethics boards or commissions have been given an extremely large mandate, with extremely inadequate resources, as I have said for decades.
As I have often said, the salary of the UH football coach well exceeds the entire budget of the State Ethics Commission (and in the past the disparity was even greater), so if you are looking for great results from all ethics boards and commissions, I think this is the first issue that needs to be addressed–resources.
In truth, I spent much more time than I should have, even as a professional, trying to address everything that needed to be done at the State Ethics Commission, but I was interested in it succeeding as much as possible, and despite the enormous barriers.
In the future, I think it is important to consider, with regard to the counties, some basic questions, the answers to which may shed light on the “independence” and “resources” of the boards.
The State Ethics Commission is independent, and is outside of the branches of government for all intents and purposes.
The commissioners of the counties are supposed to be chosen in an independent manner, but I do not think they are, as is meant by our State Constitution–and this is an issue that Senator Ihara and I have tried to correct for years with legislation, with no success.
It seems that the four county boards are all within their respective executive branches of government–not entirely sure of this, but that it a real impediment to independence. Over the years, except for Honolulu’s Ethics Board, it seems there is no permanent “dedicated” staff for the other county boards. This should be checked out. Where no dedicated staff exists, a deputy corporation counsel helps the ethics board as another part of his or her duties.
Basically, all of these boards (except for the Honolulu Ethics Board) appear to be simply at the “start” of doing their work, basically because they do not have either dedicated staff, or long-time staff.
I know about the lack of staff for various county ethics boards because I was often asked by these boards to come and visit (the State Ethics Commission paid) and was basically asked by the board members how to run an ethics commission. This happened on the Big Island many years ago, and a number of times on Kauai a number of years ago.
The Maui board never asked me to stop by, but the Maui society of journalists did ask me to speak to them a while back about what an ethics commission should do. And I have appeared before the Honolulu Ethics Board to discuss things, at their request.
While I was executive director of the Commission, I was often called by these boards to help them with matters. I was glad to do this, though I had enough work of my own to handle.
As for the Honolulu Ethics Board, back in the mid-eighties, its executive director, Becky Stretch, often called to see how we handled cases she was dealing with. After her, Carolyn Stapleton was a frequent caller. And after her, Chuck Totto has done an excellent job quickly getting up to speed when he was hired, and when he called me for my views, which was not so frequent, he was well informed and prepared, and it was easy and quite enjoyable working with him, discussing the various ways a case could be handled. He has done a very good job, and the Honolulu Ethics Board is lucky to have him.
The counties’ laws as far as I can tell are quite similar to those of the State Ethics Commission, so offering my views to those who have called from the county boards has been not difficult. For boards that do not have their own staff, the boards would be staffed, so to speak, by a deputy corporation counsel (as I mention above), who would often call me for my views as to a case, as well. Of course, confidential information was not divulged to me.
In my view, the Honolulu Ethics Board is doing a good job, and is striving to do better. What more can you ask for than dedicated personnel who carefully consider things, and strive to improve their offices (usually going far beyond the extra mile) despite the gross lack of resources?
It should also be noted that there really should be a separate commission for handling lobbying. Asking a small office to handle both all the features of governmental ethics and also lobbying is like asking the Campaign Spending Commission to handle the work of the OIP as well.
If essentially the work of two commissions is going to be handled by one, then appropriate staff and resources have to be provided.
It is not helpful to snipe at ethics agencies for not doing this or that (supposedly) when the work far exceeds resources. With such a large mandate, priorities need to be set. Thoughtless gripes about ethics boards is tantamount to saying our police department has failed because we have crime.
Further, unless one has run an ethics office, it is hard to understand the demands, especially when there is a tremendous lack of resources.
From my point of view, I spent about half of my time just trying to make sure we continued to have a functioning state ethics commission. This meant dealing with new commissioners every year who understood or did not understand what we were all about. This is a lay Commission, asking to pass judgment on matters of law. The executive director, too, was responsible for not only the attorney staff, but also how the clerical staff worked and processed forms. And then there was the budget to deal with, and four solid months of dealing with the legislature–trying to pass reform legislation (I did manage to pass about 38 bills–such as Hawaii’s first Whistleblower law, the gifts disclosure law, a law to make the enforcement hearings public, fines for violators, and so on. Of course, this is a joint effort for the whole office, but I believe I came up with the ideas for these bills, drafted them in the main, and I spent 24 years watching ethics legislation like a hawk–checking on the weekends and at night as to what the Legislature was doing or not doing.
I also increased our staff of attorneys from two to five–something that can only be done when one first produces results. But the economy since around 1995 has basically stopped expansion of the State Ethics Commission staff.
What is often not noticed is the effort to kill bills that would weaken the State Ethics Code, which was always a concern each session–requiring lots of time. I believe I managed to thwart all of these, such as an attempt by Mr. Radcliffe to exempt all UH folk from the State Ethics Code. I am not sure anyone who has not had to do this understands the time and energy required to stop such things. It is pretty much a David and Goliath kind of thing, but it can be done.
With very limited resources, the only thing one can do is have a good sense of prioritizing things. When you walk into the office in the morning, and find out that there is an ethics bill aimed at grossly weakening the State Ethics Code, that is what one deals with–what is reported on various disclosure forms (or not) and enforcement cases usually can wait for another day, since deadlines for those matters can usually be changed–the Commission has a statute of limitations of six years (another law enacted that I thought was needed).
Ian, thanks for the review of the county ethics boards, and thanks for your contributions to moving ethics and lobbying along. There is much to be done if the State is really serious about governmental ethics, and the first concern is adequate resources, and one might be able to measure the commitment to ethics by our elected state officials by examining their efforts to provide resources to the five ethics boards or commissions in our State. Perhaps this in inversely proportional to the desire for ethics in government.
Based on my somewhat limited experience with the Honolulu Ethics Commission, I would agree that we need to beef up the resources. I wasn’t aware that they handle lobbyists on top of all of the investigations they do.
Thank you, Dan, for providing this information. What do you think the chances are of getting additional funding at the county level during the next budgeting session?
Natalie, I think for an ethics agency to get a meaningful boost in its budget, there has to be a strong and coordinated effort by groups such as Common Cause and the League of Women Voters and others–like our newspapers and other media, along with others like you.
Each ethics agency should keep a list of interested people like you, and inform them when important hearings come up (like budget hearings) for you to submit supporting testimony, at least by email.
Times may be tough economically, but there is simply no excuse for creating an ethics agency and then not properly funding it–and funding it so low as to be ridiculous. I think there is one state–it may be Oklahoma or Texas–not sure, that in its state constitution says its state ethics agency gets all the money it needs–there is no cap.
Hawaii needs a similar mechanism, such as that the State Ethics Commission gets “x” percent of the budget of the Legislature–to the extent it needs that money. This also insulates against retaliation by a legislature.
It would be interesting to calculate how much the Legislature’s budget has grown percentage-wise, say, since 1980, in comparison to the budget of the State Ethics Commission.
My view, which is not original with me by any stretch of the imagination, is that if a state or country has a democratic form of government, there has to be a strong ethics laws agency (along with other good-government type agencies) with sufficient funds.
I think the cost of “unethical” conduct will always cost us (and has cost us) tons of more money than one could ever imagine, so funding well an ethics agency is really more than just stopping the use of government positions for the personal gain of government officials or their friends–there is an economic benefit for all of the people as well with a well funded ethics agency–unless one enjoys paying taxes to cover the greed of others.
The State Ethics Commission, as I have often said, has had a total budget less than the salary of the UH football coach. One would think this would make an impression or shock people, but it does not seem to. And the disparity was worse in the past (regarding the salary of the football coach), and is made worse when the State Ethics Commission has to pay private sector lease rent–the Commission has been told for decades there is no state office space available for it. Most other state agencies don’t have to pay for their office space out of their budgets–and this is another drag on the Commission’s meager budget.
I think there is still a one-page outline of all the Commission’s duties on its Web site. But, if the Commission is even going to come close to being sufficiently staffed, its staff should automatically be doubled, at least–and money provided for quality investigators, money for audits of disclosure forms (never provided), and so forth.
Perhaps there is something to be learned from the concept of hiring a very good football coach–you get what you pay for in the main. If that is the theory for hiring a football coach, perhaps it’s also the theory for funding the State Ethics Commission.
Wow. A key issue you pointed out is that we are losing money “to cover the greed of others.” (I would include power and/or control with that.) The difficulty lies in trying to educate people about an unknown. Decision makers are so tuned to benchmarks and surveys these days, it’s hard to make changes without them.
Are you aware of any national report on ethics violations? I wonder if there’s something similar to the ACFE’s Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud and Abuse. Key points would include types of ethics violations, penalties, how long the violation occurred and cost to the public.
Natalie, I am not aware of any report, but perhaps there should be one. I think the problem is just so overwhelming–who knows where to look? I don’t even know if we have a good log, so to speak, or something like an encyclopedia, which lists the various kinds of abuses–at least not on your store book shelves, I suppose.
During my career at the State Ethics Commission, I saw two cases with my own eyeballs where contracts had been awarded by state agencies for studies, and the contractors paid by the heads of the state agencies–one even requiring payment at the time drafts and a final report were due in, without anything being written at all and final payments made. One contract in today’s dollars would have been worth a million dollars. I found out that such contracts across the nation (at the time) were common.
One legislator described to me four months in advance of a purchase of private land by the State how the piece of private land, worth scores of millions, was going to be sold to to the State for way more than it was worth. The legislator said first the value of the land would be or had been doubled artificially in some fashion through bank transactions. He then said the State would then bargain the buyer down considerably from the artificially raised asking price–and thus the State would look like a “tough customer” and would get a “deal” in the end. However, since the value of the land had been essentially artificially doubled, the seller would wind up with over 20 million in money–and, again, this would be beyond the original value of the land, which, if sold appropriately, may have generated very little profit, or maybe none at all.
So why was this done? According to the legislator, there was an understanding that the extra millions would be doled out to the right people. Just another scheme, as you mention, for power and money.
Much of this, if known, would of course be criminal behavior. And I noticed while I was the director of the State Ethics Commission that many serious ethics cases often were more serious, involving criminal behavior.
A key problem with government corruption is that it is like white collar crime. The wrongdoing is often simply “deals” between two parties–and neither of them is going to tell on the other.
Thus, it is very difficult to prove a violation of law in many ethics cases and government corruption cases. And, as you mention, all of this is basically an unknown still, for us average folk. And it is rare for anyone to step forward as a whistleblower. Even over rather minor things. Retaliation is alive and well, in my opinion.
It will take lots of education. The problem is that it is fairly easy to see when things look funny, but hard to prove. So, even if one wants to speak out, it is not easy.
I see on the bookshelves more and more books that appear to deal with government “corruption”. Maybe we are all becoming a little more educated. Too, it seems that one person’s view of corruption is just a government official’s view of simply carrying out government duties. Government officials after a time believe what they are doing is actually not wrong at all–or justified in some other way.
Or, just part of the game. I was told by a former government official how he instructed the recipients of contracts to give about a 15% kickback, and how to avoid speaking about this on the phone, etc. The person did speak about it on the phone, and wound up in a penitentiary, as the FBI had been tipped off, and was listening in.
Perhaps the most interesting thing was this person telling me of his role in “leaving no tracks”. He knew I worked at the State Ethics Commission”, but seems he forget, or did not connect the dots. This was ancient enough history, so I presume a statute of limitations was involved–and it was not my jurisdiction.
A lobbyist one time I met by chance with another friend told me (he had been told of my position at the State Ethics Commission–but did not seem to understand what that meant) in a “talk story” kind of mode told me how he gifted a legislator. I took mental notes, and the legislator did wind up paying money to settle my case against the legislator. But this goes to show the casualness of all of this, despite the fact that the laws are advertised enough.
In my view, if we knew everything, we are paying quite a lot to pay for the constant greed that goes on. And, really, it is really serious greed. And as many have noted, criminal and unethical things are always done with other people’s money–usually the taxpayer in terms of government–and all those fees and taxes that go up and get created seem to me are created to help “cover” the lost revenue because of government greed and corruption.
Let’s hope those in the know (and they exist) help educate the rest of us. The problem is that it is easy to look the other way, and very tough to go on the record without absolutely solid evidence.
I think an interesting study, and this is hard to do, is to trace a government official’s financial growth. But this can easily be inflated with compensation, etc., for little real work done–but hard to prove that the work is not done.
A prominent newspaper columnist–sorry–can’t recall if it was Sandy Grady or George Will–but someone of that stature, said that government corruption just does not strike people in the same way in terms of outrage as “street crime”, which horrifies us all.
I think it was the prominent journalist Molly Ivins who said, we are all paying for it, so enjoy the show. Of course she was kidding, but her career was kicked off by her just making comments about problems–her newspaper was told that if it ran a story of hers, the paper would be shut down. So the paper (to its credit), rented billboards all over town that read “Molly Ivins can’t say that, can she?”–which became the title of her first book. The paper went on to fight another day.
But necessary services suffer as a consequence of corrupt government, and as the “can gets kicked down the road” as to the necessities for our common good, the average person winds up paying for it in taxes and other fees, in my view.
By the way, government people and their cohorts do get caught every now and then, and wind up in prison.
I would not want to spend my waning years fending off the federal government or some other law enforcement agency and still wind up in a penitentiary or prison during my golden years, or earlier. I think honesty really is the right policy, and you will find many honest politicians. I think the problem is “looking the other way” in a culture that does not promote or reward enough doing the right thing.
“corruption” is “justified” “rare . . . whistleblower.” “Retaliation” and “looking the other way. . .”
You hit the nail on the head again, Dan.
It appears that in addition to no national report or even log of ethics violations, there’s no society or association of ethics professionals. I think it’s time for an organization like that.
Our Board of Ethics on Kaua`i is a total joke- there no dedicated staff and no permanent attorney; attorneys are provided by the county attorney’s office and it isn’t always the same one that comes to meetings and they often give conflicting opinions.
All commissioners are political appointees of the mayor. The rule that no more than a bare majority can’t be from the same political party is ignored. When one commissioner actually tried to enforce some of the “Code of Ethics” a couple of years back he was not re-appointed after filling a half term.
Others are actually in violation of the code themselves, lobbying the council for money for their organizations and then ruling on whether the councilmembers violated the code. This has happened with three different commissioners who then decided that the clear charter provision forbidding this didn’t apply to not-for-profits.
We have a pretty strict ethics code but it’s ignored because “they couldn’t possibly have meant that.” Really. They’ve said that. Until recently when we made a fuss, they didn’t even look at disclosure forms. Now they control them so often the public can’t see them. They have no useful presence on-line.
I’ve written dozens of posts on their “antics” but- surprise surprise- they’re ignored. Big Mike Levine (now with Civil Beat in D.C.) did a good job exposing them when he was with our local newspaper but that’s all done and gone.
I could go on but you get the idea.
Andy, I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the things you have said. They sound very familiar to me with respect to my knowledge about many ethics agencies.
I don’t think one can assume that what happens within the four walls of an ethics agency is always on the up-and-up–(to put it mildly), not to mention the structural problems you discuss.
As the philosopher Juvenal said about two-thousand years ago, “Who is to guard the guardians?”
I am not sure we have figured that one out yet.
Ian, I’ve noticed you have visitor counts for each discussion. How do the visitor counts for the ethics discussions compare to others such as the UH debacle (after removing repeat visitors)?