Home Opinion Editorials Reasonable changes to state ethics law

Reasonable changes to state ethics law

Written by Baker City Herald Editorial Board March 31, 2009 04:14 am

Oregon legislators haven’t forgotten last spring’s rash of resignations by mayors, city councilors and other officials in rural areas.

Several dozen officials, including more than a dozen in Northeastern Oregon, quit in protest of the Oregon Ethics Reform Act.

That law, which requires officials to fill out forms describing their sources of income (but not the amounts), is designed to ensure that mayors, councilors and others don’t abuse their positions for financial gain.

Although the law had been in effect since the early 1970s, almost 100 cities, most of them small, rural communities, were exempt until Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed a revised version in 2007.

We agreed with the governor’s decision.

The ethics law is a good one, and it ought to apply to every city and county, regardless of population. It’s not as if malfeasance among public officials is confined to metropolitan areas.

Now, lawmakers are considering a bill that would delete from the law two parts that irked many of the officials who resigned last year.

The Senate Rules Committee approved that bill last week. It does away with the requirement that officials fill out forms every three months, making the task a once-a-year matter. The bill also gets rid of the mandate that officials list the names and sources of income for any relative who lives in their home and is 18 or older.

We think the current version of the law is reasonable and does not unduly invade anyone’s privacy.

But the proposed revision is better.

There’s no good reason for officials to complete the financial interests form four times per year — once is often enough.

We understand why the law requires officials to list the names of adult relatives who live with them. Nepotism is one of the more common sorts of ethical lapses.

But other laws — principally the one requiring officials to publicly announce potential financial conflicts of interest — covers such situations.

The revision version of the ethics law retains its most important elements but gets rid of the superfluous aspects that prompted so many people to resign and, in some cases, leave public boards without a quorum.

It’s just the sort of compromise that Kulongoski, during last spring’s series of resignations, said he wanted to see.