If the state ethics commission were a building, it’d have been condemned and reduced to rubble long ago. As it is, we’re stuck with an edifice nobody believes to be sound — but, equally, one which nobody seems quite sure how to fix.
Oh, there are plenty of proposals. The most recent of these, Gov. Nathan Deal’s plan to avoid conflicts of interest by appointed commission members, may be the most important. But it alone won’t solve the commission’s problems.
The commission also needs: additional money, yes; better IT infrastructure, certainly; more consistent competency among its staff, clearly. But it could also use a dose of reality among the rest of us about what, exactly, it’s supposed to be doing — and what might be best done by someone else.
Most of us still refer to it as the state ethics commission. But its name is the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission.
Now, it’s been said the purpose of renaming the State Ethics Commission with this long and clunky name was so politicians could not be accurately said to face an “ethics” complaint. There may well be some truth to that.
It’s also true that the commission isn’t tasked with ensuring “ethics” or “good government” in the broadest senses of those terms — the senses most of us probably mean when we talk about such things. Good, ethical government is desirable. But anyone expecting the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission to do more than its name suggests is bound to be disappointed.
Under state law, the commission covers financial disclosures by public officials, campaign-finance reports and lobbying rules. Of course, the commission’s recent problems concern its inability to perform even those roles. But doing those things right would still bring us only so close to good, ethical government.
The governor’s proposal to reshape the commission, with members appointed by one branch of government forbidden from hearing complaints about members of that branch, is sound public policy. It should have been done years ago.
Once that change is made, the commission needs the resources — human, technological and financial — to carry out its duties well. It is inexcusable for scores of complaints to go unresolved, just as it was inexcusable two years ago for the commission’s website to suddenly stop displaying lobbying reports just as the legislative session was winding down.
But from the current corruption trial of former DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis to the prosecution of various officials in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, it’s clear much of what we mean by “ethical government” falls well outside the purview of the “ethics commission.” For all the cases we know about, there are strong suspicions some other instances of public corruption go unprosecuted. A statewide grand jury could help with that.
And for all the belief that regulations on lobbying promote good government, the blizzard of last-minute legislative rewrites at the end of each year’s session always prompts the feeling someone’s being had. A requirement to publish before Day 40 all conference committee reports, which often make dramatic changes to bills at the last minute, could help with that.
The problems of, and solutions for, the so-called ethics commission are worth our attention. But good, ethical government requires us to look well beyond that agency alone.
