Monday, November 02, 2009
Editorial: Open wider on state conflict law
By putting state and local government work outside income reporting requirements, legislators leave a hiding place for misdeeds.
From the RoundTable blog
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Eight of Virginia's part-time legislators also work for one or another of its colleges and universities, setting up the potential for conflicts of interests: Lawmakers could seek to pad their incomes in exchange for using their influence to grant legislative favors.
A story that ran last week in The Roanoke Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk looked at these relationships and found no smoking gun.
The story did, though, spotlight a problem that might have allowed the apparent quid pro quo that forced a colleague, Del. Phil Hamilton, to resign a position at Old Dominion University.
Disclosure provisions of the state's conflict of interest law specifically exclude any salary or wages paid to lawmakers by state or local government or advisory agencies.
When the General Assembly convenes in January, one of its first actions should be to close this loophole. Lawmakers need only think about the current controversy swirling around Hamilton to understand why.
Hamilton, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, is under investigation by a House ethics panel and a federal grand jury after emails surfaced showing he negotiated a job for himself at ODU before securing state startup money for its Center for Teacher Quality and Educational Leadership.
However the investigations turn out, Hamilton can be confident he won't be found to have violated a state disclosure law that shielded his personal interest from public view.
Granted, the assembly may have had no nefarious purpose in tacking on the exclusion. After all, legislators are supposed to look out for the interests of the people in their districts, and rating high among them would be the interests of the governing bodies and institutions that serve the public.
Del. Dave Nutter of Christiansburg, who works for Virginia Tech, is to be praised, not faulted, for his efforts to win state support for advancing its mission. An elected official cannot set aside duty to a public body when it happens also to be his employer.
Still, the situation is ripe for abuse.
Virginia relies on transparency to keep its politicians from selling out the public interest to special interests in exchange for personal gain.
If voters see an economic relationship as improper or detrimental to their well-being, the theory goes, they can vote the rascal out.
"See" is the operative word here.
