Orange County CA Supervisors Again Ignore Grand Jury Recommendations
According to <a href="http://www.voiceofoc.org/county/article_7fc1f7d2-3c3b-11e4-9d96-4374dd2…; target="”_blank”">an
article Sunday on the Voice of OC website</a>, the Orange County,
CA legislative body has drafted <a href="http://goo.gl/ubOZ21" target="”_blank”">a
response</a> to <a href="http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/voiceofoc.org/content/tncms…; target="”_blank”">the
second grand jury report</a> in a year, which recommended the
creation of a county ethics program "to monitor and enforce campaign
finance and reporting and lobbyist reporting laws as well as other
ethics laws and policies." The county board of supervisors wants to
turn campaign finance enforcement over to the state ethics
commission, and leave it at that.<br>
<br>
The board's draft response asserts, “The effectiveness of the
‘ethics bodies’ is a matter of opinion and difficult to determine.
The Grand Jury’s report did not provide any metrics or analysis to
explain how ‘effectiveness’ of an ethics body is defined nor did
they provide any evidence or examples of said effectiveness.”<br>
<br>
There is no "metrics or analysis" that can show how effective an
ethics body is. There is nothing that can measure a community's
trust in its government, or the prevention of ethical misconduct,
including such things as getting more contractors to bid on
contracts they do not feel are rigged against them, getting better
employees due to an end to nepotism, getting better officials due to
the feeling that campaigns are fair and that public service is open
to everyone, or getting more citizens involved in government, so that
more views are heard and there is more effective oversight.<br>
<br>
If the Orange County board of supervisors believes that clear measurements can be made of such things, it should show how this can be
done. It should also show that state enforcement of campaign finance
rules is effective, and that enforcement is what is most important
about government ethics.<br>
<br>
As it is, neither the grand jury nor the board of supervisors
appears to truly understand government ethics or the alternatives
for an ethics program, but the grand jury shows a much greater
understanding. The supervisors' collective mind appears to have been made up before it read the
second grand jury report. The rest is merely
justification of this decision in the form of an attack on what
appears to be a sincere attempt by grand jury members to get it
right.<br>
<br>
See <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/current-ethics-reform-i-orange-county…; target="”_blank”">my
June 2013 blog post</a> on the supervisors' response to the first
grand jury report.<br>
<br>
Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
<br>
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