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Clean Water and Clean Hands
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Robert Wechsler
What do clean water laws have to do with government ethics laws?
According to an article in
today's New York Times, there are three connections. One, the water
in Scottsdale, AZ, where government ethics professionals just
congregated for a conference, has high amounts of arsenic in it.
Two, both laws provide minumum standards, and most people don't understand or accept this fact (see my blog post on this topic as it applies to ethics laws).
The Clean Water Act started with standards for only twenty substances, increasing to ninety substances by 2000. Although the understanding of dangers from these and many other substances grew in this decade (as did, in many instances, their appearance in our drinking water), the Bush administration dug in its heels, sat on its hands, and did nothing.
Just because water meets legal requirements doesn't mean it's safe to drink. Similarly, just because an official's conduct meets an ethics law's requirements doesn't mean it's ethical.
And just as officials, when confronted, tend to say they didn't violate the law, people misrepresent or misunderstand the minimum standards of the Clean Water Act by arguing that amounts of a substance don't violate the law. For example, a woman whose home sits next to a reservoir covered with plastic balls to keep the sun from making chemicals carcinogenic said, “They supposedly discovered these chemicals, and then they ruined the reservoir by putting black pimples all over it. If the water is so dangerous, why can’t they tell us what laws it’s violated?”
Similarly, the head of a utility authority said, “If it doesn’t violate the law, I don’t really pay much attention to it."
Ethics laws are similar to water laws in a third way: the effects of polluted water and unethical behavior are usually invisible and don't manifest themselves overnight. They take a long time to act, and there are many other factors involved, so people tend to assume they're not as bad as some people say.
Human nature and H2O are the same worldwide, but they are polluted at different rates in different ethical and political environments. Cities and counties with high cancer or official conviction rates show the effects of long-term pollution of drinking water and government ethics.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
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Two, both laws provide minumum standards, and most people don't understand or accept this fact (see my blog post on this topic as it applies to ethics laws).
The Clean Water Act started with standards for only twenty substances, increasing to ninety substances by 2000. Although the understanding of dangers from these and many other substances grew in this decade (as did, in many instances, their appearance in our drinking water), the Bush administration dug in its heels, sat on its hands, and did nothing.
Just because water meets legal requirements doesn't mean it's safe to drink. Similarly, just because an official's conduct meets an ethics law's requirements doesn't mean it's ethical.
And just as officials, when confronted, tend to say they didn't violate the law, people misrepresent or misunderstand the minimum standards of the Clean Water Act by arguing that amounts of a substance don't violate the law. For example, a woman whose home sits next to a reservoir covered with plastic balls to keep the sun from making chemicals carcinogenic said, “They supposedly discovered these chemicals, and then they ruined the reservoir by putting black pimples all over it. If the water is so dangerous, why can’t they tell us what laws it’s violated?”
Similarly, the head of a utility authority said, “If it doesn’t violate the law, I don’t really pay much attention to it."
Ethics laws are similar to water laws in a third way: the effects of polluted water and unethical behavior are usually invisible and don't manifest themselves overnight. They take a long time to act, and there are many other factors involved, so people tend to assume they're not as bad as some people say.
Human nature and H2O are the same worldwide, but they are polluted at different rates in different ethical and political environments. Cities and counties with high cancer or official conviction rates show the effects of long-term pollution of drinking water and government ethics.
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
---
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