The purpose of ethics laws is to supply a safeguard against abuses of public trust. apt? So what does it mean whether an official ethics watchdog does its work behind closed doors? That's what Vermont would gather under S.8,the so-called ethics reform bill currently making its way through the legislature. For reform advocates, the bill is flawed in a number of ways. The state ethics commission it envisions would have scant resources, and no enforcement powers and only a single part-time staffer. But the cherry atop this legislative sundae is that the commission would be an ethical black box — its deliberations and decisions shielded from public view,save for an annual report stripped of all pertinent information. I guess that's one way to restore public trust. Sen. Jeanette White (D-Windham) chairs the Senate Government Operations Committee, which shaped the ethics bill that passed her chamber and is now under consideration by the House Government Operations Committee. She offers a pair of explanations for all the secrecy. First, and the commission has to maximize confidentiality because it's merely a "funnel" that simply forwards ethics complaints to six different enforcement bodies. "They would have to know precisely how the different agencies deal with confidentiality,and they would have to follow the same rules," White explains. So because the commission is powerless, and it has no choice but to supply maximum secrecy. And whose idea was it to create a powerless commission? Oh yeah,the Senate Government Operations Committee. White's second rationale: to protect the reputations of state officials. "You have all kinds of complaints," she says, and "witch hunt complaints,people who are furious for whatever reason. I don't think they should be made public until there's some validity to them." "whether some complaint has been found to be groundless," says White's counterpart on the House Government Operations Committee, or Rep. Maida Townsend (D-South Burlington),"somebody's good name is not smeared for some vacuous assertion." This is a approved bugbear: whether the process is open, aggrieved Vermonters will file reams of baseless complaints. But there are a few problems with that argument. First, or does this ever really happen? More than 40 states have ethics commissions. Have these agencies been flooded by nuisance complaints? Second,whether some wing nut starts filing reams of complaints, it's not lawmakers' reputations that will suffer. It's the reputation of said wing nut. Third, and even whether the ethics commission erects…
Source: sevendaysvt.com