Well, it looks like lobbyists won another one.

At least that’s my reaction to a ruling last month by the City Ethics Commission.

In Advisory Opinion 2010-3, the commission began with what looked like a simple question: When a lobbyist gives a city official a gift, what is that gift worth?

The question can be significant because Honolulu’s ethics laws prohibit any city official or employee from taking a gift worth more than $200 “as long as the gift-giver has an interest that the city official may affect in the course of fulfilling his or her job duties.”

It seems simple. Our public officials should not put themselves in a position where their official actions could be seen as influenced by gifts from lobbyists and other interested parties.

It seems to me that the ordinary way of answering the value question would be that a gift is worth what the giver had to pay for it, unless there are unusual circumstances. If you buy something for $100 and give it as a gift to a city official, the official has received a gift worth $100.

That’s how it would work in ordinary, everyday situations. If someone asks how much your car cost, you would tell them what you paid. Few people would assume that it would be necessary to tear the car apart and make a list of its individual components, then price each of those, in order to come up with the car’s value.

In this particular case, a member of the city council wanted to know how a gift of a ticket to a political fundraiser should be valued for purposes of the gift law.

The commission decided that this kind of gift involves two discrete transactions.

First, the gift-giver, in this case a lobbyist, buys the gift from a seller, in this case apparently a campaign. That involves an exchange of a certain amount of money.

Then, according to the commission, there’s a second transaction when the lobbyist gives the fundraiser ticket to a city official, in this case a council member. The commission decided that the value of the gift changed dramatically between transaction #1 and transaction #2.

Let’s say the ticket was to a $500 per person fundraiser. The lobbyist pays $500 and gets the ticket, then turns around and gives it to the council member. What’s its value then? According to the commission, suddenly it’s only worth the actual price of the direct benefit received, in this case the price of the food served, which would likely be something on the order of 10 percent of the amount paid.

Although the council member would have been prohibited from accepting the ticket if valued at its original cost to the gift-giver, the commission would allow the gift because, in their view, it’s worth dramatically less to the recipient.

Because this opinion was issued in response to a verbal inquiry from the council member, there was no complainant to present a different viewpoint than the one eventually adopted by the commission. The public had no voice in this interpretation of the ethics laws.

It seems to me that this is one of the situations in which the commission failed in its obligation to interpret the city charter and the ethics ordinances strictly, rather than finding ways to cut officials a lot of slack (which ends up being to the benefit of the lobbyists and other gift-givers rather than to the public).

The City Charter’s declaration of policy regarding ethics begins:

Elected and appointed officers and employees shall demonstrate by their example the highest standards of ethical conduct, to the end that the public may justifiably have trust and confidence in the integrity of government.

This mirrors the State Constitution, which provides:

The people of Hawaii believe that public officers and employees must exhibit the highest standards of ethical conduct and that these standards come from the personal integrity of each individual in government.

You can’t assure “the highest standards” by essentially removing an important prohibition on gifts through an interpretation that runs contrary to common understanding of language, as the commission did in this case.

Oh–the published opinion is signed by the ethics commission chair, Lex Smith, an attorney with the firm of Kobayashi, Sugita & Goda.

I don’t know Lex Smith, but I know he telephoned me back in January on behalf of Honolulu Managing Director Kirk Caldwell’s campaign. He’s also appeared before the Campaign Spending Commission representing Mayor Mufi Hannemann’s campaign, and earlier represented Mayor Jeremy Harris’ campaign in a federal lawsuit. He has also been paid to represent the city in certain legal cases involving leasehold conversion.

Smith was reappointed to the commission by Mayor Hannemann in 2007, and at that time described himself as a political independent who is not a member of either political party. In an “appointee personal information form,” Smith said that he saw no “possible conflict” between any of his personal or business interests or “any other activity” and his duties with the commission.

Personally, I don’t see how someone so actively involved in the campaigns of the managing director and the mayor could have answered the question in that manner, or why it didn’t raise any questions during the appointment process.