By Caitlin Ginley

Citing the Buckeye State’s D grade from the State Integrity Investigation, Democratic legislators in Ohio have called for a bipartisan task force to review current ethics laws and consider new legislation to strengthen accountability and transparency.

“We have a responsibility to the people of Ohio and it is simply unacceptable for us to fail to ensure government is working for Ohioan’s best interest at all times, not for special interest or influences,” said Rep. Jay Goyal (D-Mansfield), in a press conference held Tuesday.

In a letter to legislative leaders, the House Democrats noted “great concern over the recent ethics report from the State Integrity Investigation.”

Among the 14 categories on the state scorecard, they pointed out, Ohio only received two grades higher than a C-. The state failed three categories: legislative accountability, lobbying disclosure and redistricting.

Ohio also received D - grades for executive accountability and judicial accountability, D+ grades for pension fund management and insurance commissions, and C- grades for public access to information, political financing, procurement, and ethics enforcement. Rep. Ted Celeste (D-Grandview Heights) said the grades are not something to be proud of, especially since the state received F’s in a few individual categories.

“We should do everything we can to improve our efforts here,” he said.

In addition to its call for new legislation, the letter also asked for reconsideration of some earlier proposals. Celeste said House Democrats have previously put forth legislation that would address some of the gaps in Ohio’s ethics laws, but those bills have not received serious consideration. Celeste and his colleagues are calling for hearings on those measures, which include proposed new regulations on independent expenditures by corporations and unions and creation of a public financing system for judicial elections.

Those hearings would be held when the legislature returns from spring recess. Another bill would require that records of public-private partnerships, a growing trend in Ohio, be made available to the public. Rep. Matt Lundy (D-Elyria), who sponsored the bill, said these entities – like JobsOhio, a semi-private agency focused on economic development – spend state dollars but are not currently subject to the state’s open record laws.

“It’s hard to keep track of where the money is going,” Lundy said. “If you can’t follow the dollars, you can’t keep track of accountability.”

The fate of the Democrats’ recommendations seems uncertain at best. A spokesman for the Republican House speaker, William Batchelder, told the Columbus Dispatch that the speaker takes transparency and accountability seriously, but questioned the “flawed methodology” of the State Integrity Investigation. The GOP controls both the state House and Senate, as well as the governor’s office. Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, said he stands by the State Integrity Investigation’s methodology and reporting.

If you want your elected officials to take action, send them your state’s report card. Click on the “E-mail this score to your state official” button, and the report card will automatically fill in the e-mail address for your governor and state legislators. Connect with the leaders in your state, and get your report card to the people who represent you.

(Photo credit: Alexander Smith.)

In 2011, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission assessed $7 million worth of fines for campaign finance violations. But because the commission, formerly known as the Georgia State Ethics Commission, couldn’t afford to send out notices by certified mail, fines against politicians, officials, and parties were cut to a total of around $1 million.

The inability of the commission to pay for a service essential to its duties is, to Georgia Senator Doug Stoner (D-Smyrna), indicative of a larger issue. The disgust was obvious in Stoner’s voice as he explained how the state of Georgia gave up $6 million in revenue. “The fact that the ethics commission could not send out certified mail should tell you that we have a problem,” Stoner said.

In response, Stoner is proposing an overhaul package that would mean a dramatic upgrade in how the state polices its political spending.

Under Stoner’s plan a new ethics commission would be created, one that operates independent of the executive branch – which currently arranges the commission’s makeup through the governor’s appointments – and the legislature, which sets its budget. One bill would give the state’s supreme and appellate courts the power to select commissioners; a companion bill would guarantee steady funding for the commission.

The commission’s budget, like those of other state agencies, has faced dramatic cuts in recent years. But Stoner says the cuts have been too deep, and can create the appearance of impropriety, pointing out the recent coincidence of a large cut levied at the same time the commission investigated a past speaker of the house.

Stoner (pictured, right) says there’s no proof that budget cuts have been targeted to protect individual lawmakers. “But it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “The public perception is that that’s what happened.”

The commission currently operates on an annual budget of about $1 million, a nearly 50 percent decrease from its highest level. Stoner’s bill would guarantee the commission a funding level of 0.01 percent of the state’s total expenditure — which would grant the ethics board $1.4 million a under the current budget — and make its funding invulnerable to the legislature’s impulses.

“Does it make sense for us to be overseeing this — our own ethics?” Stoner asked rhetorically. “In that sense, it’s vulnerable to us cutting the budget at whim.”

Stoner’s bill will first need to make it through the Senate committee process, at which point it will move on to the House of Representatives. Stoner thinks it’s obvious that Georgia needs an independent, fully funded ethics commission, and issued a preemptive challenge to the bills’ opponents.  

“Anyone that’s saying we shouldn’t do it,” Stoner said, “to me, they’re going to have a hard time explaining to the public why we’re not.”

Legislative immunity in Alabama was once necessary to protect lawmakers from a surprising threat: The governor.

“In the olden days, it’s my understanding that the governor would send state police to arrest legislators to keep them from voting,” said Alabama Senator Arthur Orr. With a laugh, Orr added: “I don’t believe that’s a concern anymore.”

Orr (R-Decatur) is seeking to repeal the legislative immunity law as part of an “accountability package” he hopes will take away some of the special privileges elected officials enjoy. Citing a recent case in which an Alabama legislator avoided arrest for driving under the influence by invoking the immunity clause, Orr said it’s unfair to have different levels of culpability for officials and citizens.

“Those in public service, in office, should not be held to a different standard than those they represent,” Orr said.

Under current law, legislators can claim immunity while the legislature is in session if the suspected offense is a misdemeanor. Orr’s example is hardly a new one: Lawmakers have recently used immunity to dodge arrests in high-profile incidents in Georgia and Arizona.

A second piece of the accountability package deals with what happens after a state employee has actually been caught and punished. Under Orr’s proposed legislation, the state would no longer pay out pensions to state workers who have been convicted of felony corruption.

As it stands now, state officials who have taken bribes or kickbacks are still due state contributions to their pension funds. Orr (pictured, right) says it’s acceptable to dole out someone’s own pension contributions that were paid into the system, but the taxpayers should be left out of it.

“The other thing is, perhaps requiring this forfeiture could, possibly, restrain someone from attempting, or going down the criminal path,” Orr said.

Orr hopes that the accountability measures he is proposing will help combat the public distrust of government that he’s noticed in recent years.

“I have not been in public service that long, a little over 5 years now,” Orr said. “It seems to me that there has been an erosion of public confidence – not only in Alabama, but across the country – that people have in their officials. This erosion of confidence needs to be restored by taking steps like this.”

Insurance commissioners are typically among the least-known, least-publicized officials in state government. Last month, one commissioner found a way to make news: Without warning, he resigned.

David Black (pictured, right) had only served as director of the South Carolina Department of Insurance for 10 months before he announced his resignation in an email to colleagues on Dec. 28. Black’s e-mail offered little explanation for the timing of his announcement.

“After reflection,” he wrote, “I decided last week it would be best for me to resign as Director of the Agency.”

Black has yet to give a more thorough account, and the state government hasn’t provided any answers, either.  The suddenness of Black’s departure and the silence that followed have left the curious to speculate on what led to his decision. Local observers are quick to point out that Black’s agency had become embroiled in controversy in the weeks prior to his exit.

In March, Black was among 12 panelists tasked with determining how the state would implement a health insurance exchange, a crucial aspect of federal health care reform. The panel was supposed to be an independent body studying whether South Carolina’s exchanges should be established by federal or state officials. But the independence of the panel and its findings have been severely undermined.

A Dec. 14 report in the Charleston Post and Courier found that Gov. Nikki Haley and her staff attempted to dictate the panel’s findings before the group even met.  In an e-mail to a committee member who wrote much of the panel’s final report, Haley (pictured, right) wrote, “The whole point of this commission should be to figure out how to opt out and how to avoid a federal takeover, NOT create a state exchange.” Haley’s influence over the group – which ultimately followed her orders, recommending that the state not create its own exchange – looked even more suspicious because the governor’s office failed to disclose the e-mails after a request from the Post and Courier. The messages only surfaced when the paper made a separate records request to another state agency.

Following the story’s publication, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General, asking for an investigation into whether Haley’s administration had misused part of the $1 million federal grant used to fund the panel.

“Spending taxpayer funds to construct an ideologically-motivated façade not only violates Congress’s intent, but also the public’s trust in government,” Harkin wrote.

Only a week after Harkin’s letter, David Black resigned his post.  Black told Cynthia Williams, another participant on the insurance panel, that he had not received instructions from Haley and had tried to do his job in an honorable way. But, as Williams said at the time of Black’s resignation, the publishing of Haley’s e-mails had “cast a pall over the whole thing.”

Black’s brief tenure in South Carolina government is a powerful lesson in the value of an independent insurance commissioner, and what happens when that independence is tarnished by political influence.