General Advisory Opinions Are Very Useful

A couple of months ago, the Ohio Ethics Commission did something very wise and valuable:  it drafted an advisory opinion on nepotism rules, gathering information from years of partial, specific advisory opinions, and providing examples. It even gives excellent definitions of each of the relevant terms, including such generally applicable terms as "public contract"  and "anything of value."

Formal advisory opinions are extremely useful, but often problematic, in that they tend to be overly legalistic, specific to facts that might not arise often, and difficult to access. Some forms of indexing, for example, by both term and ethics code provision, facilitate the job of consulting relevant advisory opinions, but it is difficult for non-lawyer officials to do this themselves. In fact, most of them won't even know the advisory opinions exist, where to find them, or how to read or use them.

For all these reasons, the availability of general advisory opinions such as this one can make an official's job much easier. Have a question about nepotism rules? Here's most everything you need to know about it.

The general advisory opinion is the latest index entry in the list of advisory opinions on nepotism, but there is nothing in the index that says this is a general opinion, which officials will want to consult first. It would be useful to include the advisory opinion as an information sheet on the EC website's Informational Materials page.

Most local government EC's will not have 25 years of opinions to pull together and summarize. But it would still be worthwhile to formulate such general opinions either under the rubric of "advisory opinion" or as information sheets that interpret ethics provisions and give examples of what situations they apply to and do not apply to. Guidance before the fact is the most important role of an ethics commission.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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