Common Errors Involving Ethics Commission Jurisdiction

I recently wrote about the problem of having a toothless ethics commission in a Connecticut city. According to an article in yesterday's Danbury News-Times, it's good that another Connecticut municipality's ethics commission is toothless.

But the story has less to do with teeth than it has to do with what government ethics is all about. It's that word "ethics" again. Ethics is about good behavior, but government ethics is about conflicts of interest. It's hard for a lot of people to accept this. I get calls all the time from people who want advice about officials' misbehavior that does not fall under the jurisdiction of any ethics commission.

Some of those people happen to serve on ethics commissions. And some laws are so vague that almost anything seems to fall under the ethics commission's jurisdiction.

Take Brookfield, CT. The old ethics code said that it governed "the conduct of all elected and appointed officials and all employees..." That's very broad.

The new ethics code, passed last August, rephrases but preserves this breadth. It says that it "sets forth the standards for conduct by which officers/employees shall conduct all public business." And the town has added a section entitled "Other Abuses or Misuses of Position," which includes criminal conviction, discrimination, harassment, intimidation, and intentional physical harm as ethical violations. That's a lot of territory for an ethics commission to cover, and it leads to overlapping jurisdiction with other municipal, state, and federal bodies.

The new code even seems to imply that a violation of the town charter is itself within the ethics commission's jurisdiction, or at least this is how one member of the town's board of selectmen read it.

One of the ethics commission's decisions did involve an alleged violation of the charter: the hiring by the zoning board chair of a lawyer to review decisions made by the board of zoning appeals. No conflict appears to have been alleged, just conduct outside what is allowed by the charter.

The other ethics commission decision involved the state's Freedom of Information Act.

The town attorney appears to have handled the problem very well. "The issue really boils down to what jurisdiction the Board of Ethics has," he said.

With respect to the mention of the charter in the code's Declaration of Policy, he said, "That's broad language that indicates what the town of Brookfield itself would desire and require in one way or another. The code itself makes a distinction between things that may be violations of proper behavior [but may not rise to the level of being violations of the Code of Ethics itself] ...  The ethics board was never, as far as I know, designed to be the overseer of all proper practices in town government."

One problem is that there is no clear way to deal with charter violations. The town attorney said that they should be handled by the board of selectmen, but what if  the board itself violates the charter?

The town attorney said that if the charter violation also involved a possible violation of the ethics code, then the ethics commission could have jurisdiction, too. The First Selectman, effectively the mayor, said that this was a very narrow distinction. But to someone who knows what ethics codes are for, the space between ethics code and charter violations couldn't be larger.

This is one of many reasons why ethics education is so important.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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