Friday, Sept. 5, 2003 | 4:38 a.m.
Think of it: Amid allegations of crass payoffs, delivered by ex-Commissioner Lance Malone, and quid pro quos between elected officials, including Chairwoman Mary Kincaid-Chauncey, and strip club owners (and maybe developers), telling commissioners not to accept gifts over $50 is laughable. (And while you can't accept that bottle of Dom Perignon, that dinner at Cili with someone looking for your vote is just fine.)
What's so sad about this inexorable set of circumstances is that the county's ethics task force, revived by Commissioner Rory Reid and led by law school Dean Richard Morgan, produced a worthwhile product that commissioners will look at this week. But the ethics mavens are handicapped by the political corruption probe that makes a cynical public even more cynical and by the ineluctable fact that dishonest people will always find a way to behave dishonestly.
To their credit, the ethics task force proposed few specifics outside of the gift ceiling and a one-year cooling-off period, thus preventing the formation of a Guidebook for the Unethical. Say specifically what someone cannot do, and someone surely will find a loophole.
And I also give kudos to the group because fundamentally the members relied on the principle that disclosure is paramount and it should be made along the lines of a seminal state Ethics Commission ruling, ironically requested by a county commissioner (Bruce Woodbury) and one that is routinely ignored.
One of the most nettlesome problems in local government is that these part-time folks will routinely disclose only that they have a conflict, without providing any details as the Woodbury opinion mandates. This regularly occurs at the Las Vegas City Council, where almost no one follows the Woodbury opinion's admonition to fully disclose the nature of the conflict so your colleagues and the public have that information. Mayor Oscar Goodman, who has extensive land holdings, often will not go into detail. But the most egregious offender is Goodman council toy Michael Mack, who not only is quietly and aggressively (his word) seeking public relations clients from those who come before him (with His Honor's tacit approval), but whose disclosures are often vague.
The revolving door is one thing, which the cooling-off period tries to prevent -- or at least delay. But in the case of Mack and at one time at least one sitting commissioner, Yvonne Atkinson Gates, to be inside the door and still be soliciting business from those you regulate is blatantly unethical -- and nowhere covered in these pending rules.
The county ethics experts have produced three documents for commission review. The first is a list of guiding principles, some of which echo the Woodbury opinion. Others seem obvious and/or insipid -- i.e. "Education is a good thing."
The second document contains the actual proposals, which is where the county folks did their best work, using clear language to express often-amorphous precepts. To wit:
"A 'conflicting interest' is any interest of the County Official (financial, personal, collaborative or otherwise) that could reasonably impair, or that could be construed as impairing by a reasonable third party, his or her ability to act in the County's or public's best interests in the matter. Potentially conflicting interests often arise from outside employment, donor/donee or debtor/creditor relationships, consulting arrangements, family or personal relationships, legal or fiduciary arrangements and business investments."
Besides the gift ceiling, the only other specific language is in the section on the one-year, cooling-off period, which is airtight. Violating the cooling-off period can result in indefinite extensions of the lobbying prohibition.
Penalties are always problematic in these cases. If an elected official is exposed as unethical, beyond any crime, the voters should be the ones to administer justice. If they are not elected, then the sanctions must be much more severe -- steep fines and possible criminal charges.
The final document in the package is an essay by task force member and quotemeister Craig Walton, a UNLV professor, who suggests that ethics workshops might be helpful as they are in any profession.
"Some say ethics issues call for nothing more than common sense, or a good upbringing," Walton writes. "But this is not true. Political ethics issues often involve conflict situations which do not easily yield up clear answers based on common sense."
Here I don't think he could be more wrong. In the decade and a half I have watched these issues, nearly every high-profile ethics case involves behavior that fell squarely out of the gray.
Gates trying to get daiquiri stands in casinos she regulates. Gates and Malone putting friends on a list for airport contracts. Michael McDonald using his city councilman's post to help bail his employer out of debt. Mack taking a loan from someone with interests before the city.
This is not rocket science, much less ethics science, professor. Yes, appointed officials and even some pols might have some questions about niggling points. But most of this behavior that has been exposed in the media and vetted by ethics panels is all too clear.
And so long as we have part-time politicians with outside interests and leaders who foster an unethical ethos by their failure to condemn their colleagues who behave badly, no group of well-intentioned experts will be able to fix the worst of human nature.
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