ethics – Page 3 – Hank Kalet

Prescriptions for a cleaner New Jersey(Good-government edition)

I didn’t get a chance to read Charles Stiles’ column on Trenton’s (imperceptible) efforts at ethics reform last week because I was on vacation, but it is worth commenting on. Stiles makes it clear that the Democratic leadership has “promised us The Great Campaign Finance and Ethics Reform Crusade for 2008,” but that “as we close in on the year’s halfway mark, the accomplishments have been modest, at best.”

And he may be being generous.

Stiles says that, if the party in power was serious about reform, there are no shortage of proposals on the table, including requiring the state Election Law Enforcement Commission to monitor money contributed to personal defense funds, requiring ethics training for elected officials (Monroe does this now), allowing issue ads but requiring that candidates disclose their involvement and benefit, banning the wheeling of campaign contributions, ending dual-office holding and banning convicted ex-legislators from representing clients before local agencies.

Reform-minded

Charles Stile in The Record touches on a note similar to the one I strike in my own column today: the unlikelihood that the Legislature will pass real reforms.

Governor Corzine has promised a renewed agenda on the issue this year, and so have leaders of the Legislature. But Corzine’s State of the State speech next week will be almost solely devoted to his plan to restructure state debt by raising tolls. That obsession will probably eat up much of his agenda this year. And he is not likely to do something dramatic, such as extend New Jersey’s pay-to-play ban with a sweeping executive order, which has been pushed by campaign finance advocates.

There will be little appetite or time for sweeping reforms this year. Besides, the Democratic leadership is not inclined to unilaterally level the playing field just because their Republican counterparts say it’s the right thing to do.

Senate President Dick Codey is a cautious incrementalist, not a firebrand reformer. Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts wants to “put everything on the table” for discussion and also talks of a future in which all legislative contests operate under “clean elections” guidelines. Sounds intriguing, but I suspect we’ll see a raft of smaller reforms while we wait for the full realization of his utopian vision.

Stile then offers some interesting ideas — “small, albeit important steps that lawmakers can take this year that could serve as critical building blocks of reform”:

Require candidates and campaign committees to spend most of their contributions on their own races. This would limit sending — or “wheeling” — large blocks of money from one part of the state to another.

Shrewd contributors donate to several county committees and races, with the hope (and tacit understanding) that it will be spent for some of the sky’s-the-limit battles. But the practice allows donors to evade contribution limits and makes party leaders indebted to special interests who pay the tab. Codey has talked about passing a law that plainly states that “wheeling” is illegal. That’s not enough.

Limit the amount of money legislative leaders can spend on races. There was something surreal last year in watching legislative leaders wiring World Bank-sized loans to pay for life-and-death power struggles in the wilderness of Cape May and Cumberland counties.

The only ones who benefited were political consultants, who got a percentage for the cost of producing all those negative mailers and television ads. I know this is wishful thinking, but I don’t feel the panel that promoted the creation of these legislative leadership committees in 1993 envisioned giving them this kind of corporate power to raise and spend money.

Ban state contractors from making donations to legislative leaders. The pay-to-play ban prohibits donors from receiving lucrative state contracts if they gave contributions to the governor or to the campaign accounts controlled by the governor’s party, such as county committees. But donors get around that by giving to legislative leaders, who are exempt from the ban.

Close the loophole in the state pay-to-play ban that exempts politically connected law firms, engineers, architects and other professional services. Technically, the ban does restrict these firms from getting state work, but it only forbids principals who hold at least a 10 percent equity stake in the firm. That allows firms’ partners and associates to continue giving without fear of penalty.

These are intriguing reforms that, absent the larger changes needed, could keep the notion of ethics on the table.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Questionable financing for stadium

Charles Stile in The Record puts into words the uneasy feeling I felt about the private fundraising effort announced by Gov. Jon Corzine and state Sen. Ray Lesniak to make the Rutgers football stadium expansion a reality.

The governor was right to strip the project of state funding, given the sorry state of New Jersey’s finances. But his basic character flaw — a need to make everyone happy — has resulted in a flawed approach to the funding the project.

There are several problems.

First, as Stile points out, the Corzine/Lesniak plan creates the potential for influence peddling.

Alumni, students and small businesses are likely contributors. But if those donations are classified as confidential, charitable contributions, what’s to stop, say, auto insurance carriers, utilities, casinos and other state-regulated industries from pumping piles of campaign cash toward the cause?

What about developers, facing trouble with wetlands applications at the Department of Environmental Protection? And how about all those contractors barred from making political contributions by the state’s pay-to-play bans? Here’s a chance to give without fear of penalty — or public disclosure.

In essence, the stadium campaign has the potentail to drill massive holes in efforts to break the grip that campaign donors have on the legislative process. Pay-to-play restrictions, public financing, lobbying disclosure, all go out the window if the same people who are prohibited from contributing to the governor or a senate campaign or who are limited can then give for one of Gov. Corzine or Sen. Lesniak’s pet projects.

The second issue I have with the expansion and the fundraising is that the money could be used to bring back some other, smaller sports or to fund academics. The desire on the part of Rutgers — my alma mater — to be a bigtime football program is understandable.

But Rutgers’ mission is not and should not be to field a great football team. Its mission should be to provide a great learning environment for its students and to expand college opportunities for as many New Jersey residents who want to attend and have the grades and test scores to get in. That would mean finding way to reduce tuition for all, or at least subisidize it to a greater degree for most.

The Scarlet Knights’ mediocre 2007 season should be a reminder that football success is fleeting. The school’s reputation as a quality university should not be.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Subpoenas by the letter

Interesting post from Wally Edge on Politics NJ today that reminds us that Democrats are not the only ones who know how to use their office to take care of their own:

The Record‘s story this morning on the federal probe of legislators who received some personal benefit from state budget items suggests that only Democrats are being targeted. According to The Record, there are some similarities between State Senator Joseph Coniglio and Assemblyman Brian Stack, both Democrats who have received subpoenas, and two Republican legislators who have not: State Senator Robert Singer and Assemblyman David Wolfe.

Like Coniglio, Singer works for a hospital — he is with the St. Barnabas Health Care System, which runs two facilities in Ocean County — that has received “Christmas Tree” grants. And Wolfe, like Stack, has a wife who works for a non-profit organization that has received funding from the state; Carol Wolfe’s organization, Homes Now, received $500,000 from the state in 1999 to build a women’s shelter in their hometown, Brick. Carol Wolfe founded the group in 1997, but did not receive a salary until 2001.

While the statute of limitations for most non-capital federal offenses is five years but federal prosecutors can look back further in some cases. In the Jack Abramoff corruption case, they went as far back as 1997 to detail offenses he ultimately pled guilty to.

This brings into focus something that the GOP is unwilling to address, i.e., the party’s own complicity in the “Christmas Tree” program. While sites like Red Generation and Enlighten NJ like to use the flow of subpoenas around the state as an indictment of Democrats, the reality is that Republicans have been willing collaborators.

The difference right now between the Democrats and Republicans has far more to do with power than with anything endemic within the New Jersey Democratic soul.

“I don’t think the Christmas tree was planted in 2004,” said Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle, D-Englewood.

Most of the subpoenas served on lawmakers and their aides in recent months seek records starting in 2004. That could be for a number of reasons, including the fact that the probe began with a senator who became chairman of the Budget Committee that year. But it also happens to be the year Democrats took full control of the Legislature. That has some wondering whether Republicans would be getting more of the subpoenas if investigators looked back a bit further.

In the context of the U.S. Attorney’s probe and the apparent politicization of the federal Department of Justice, it is a fair question to ask.

That said, the most important thing that can come out of this mess is reformation of the process, an opening up of the budget to ensure that these last-second grants are given the kind of scrutiny they deserve. At least some of the money in question was for legitimate programming, but all of it now is tainted by the actions of a handful of elected officials.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

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Make it public

This probably won’t quiet the small squall surrounding the governor, but he is asking “a panel of ethics advisers to review his conduct during recent negotiations over a new contract for state workers and his financial ties to union leader Carla Katz.”

I can understand his reticence about going public with some of the information here, but at the same time he is a public official, the chief executive of the state and his behavior needs to be above board. This is especially true in the wake of the McGreevey scandals and all of the other ethical problems facing the state.

His past relationship with Carla Katz is always going to be an issue. The two of them can make it less so only by allowing us into some areas they might prefer to keep private. That’s not comfortable and may not be fair, but he’s the one who chose to run for governor.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here