 Welcome to week eight of Capitol Beat. I'm Josh O'Horman with the Vermont Press Bureau and joining me now is Secretary of State Jim Kondos and we are going to discuss the possible creation of an ethics commission. We know that this is something that you are in favor of. So if you would tell us what is an ethics commission and why do you think this would be good for the state? Well, first let me start off by saying Josh, thank you for having me, but I also wanna say that the vast majority of our local state and municipal officials are trustworthy, are dedicated, are trying to do the right thing for their communities, but when you can have little, it's kind of like the death of by a thousand cuts. The whole idea is that we need to prevent any even ripples of corruption entering into our governments. What we've seen in our office receives calls almost every day of the week from municipals, from municipal officials, from constituents of those officials. We receive calls from state officials about potential problems and we research it and try to give them an answer as to whether the right processes or whatever to follow what the law says. And what we've seen is an increase in the number of complaints that are coming to us from citizens. And my feeling when I started looking into this was that we're one of three or four states in the country that does not have an ethics commission, an independent ethics commission, to receive those complaints, investigate them and determine if there's any validity and then make recommendations or enforce the law. And if you just look at the Northeast, we're the only state in the Northeast and that includes Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York. We're the only state in the Northeast that does not have an ethics commission. The usual statement is that, hey, this is a small state, we know everybody. Therefore, we don't need it. But it's the little things that happened that really create the problems. We've seen an increased number of embezzlements. I'm sure you've covered some of them. We've had open meeting law violations. And conflict of interest is a huge issue and I think that what really starts to happen is that we do not have a mandatory conflict of interest policy. What we have is enabling legislation that allows municipalities and state government to have the authority to set one but they don't have a mandate to set one. So at the very minimum, I'm suggesting that that's what we need to do is at least mandate that every state agency, every appointed officer, every municipal officer has a conflict of interest policy and a code of conduct that they follow. That will probably reduce 90% of what we have out there. But there's a case recently that a state in south of here, a town south of here where the select board paid itself through contracts some half a million dollars for projects that they were doing in the town. It's kind of, it's really like, really? How do you go about that? So what current recourse does a rank and file resident of Vermont have right now if they believe that there is a conflict of interest? What can they do about it right now? The great question because in general, the first question we always ask is, does your town have a conflict of interest policy? Because it is enabling, there's no mandate that they have it. So that's the first question. And then we say refer to that conflict of interest policy to determine what the conflicts are that they cover and what the procedures are for addressing them. The other thing is to bring them up. Bring them out in the public. Go to the select board meetings and ask the questions, the important questions that need to be asked at the select board meetings or even at town meetings since town meetings in another two weeks, it's probably a good thing to do is to ask at town meeting, what are you doing about this? Or even to have citizens ask their town to adopt a conflict of interest policy. So I think there's a lot that can be done that really doesn't cost a whole lot. And I know there's a lot of concern in the building about the cost of setting up an ethics commission with staff and whatever. My only response to that is, what's the cost of having good government? What's the cost of having a good democracy? And I think it's a pretty minimal when you look at it in those terms. So that's a totally, what sort of authority would an ethics commission have in terms of either levying just any sort of binding decisions or what sort of authority would they have, you think? Well, there's probably 47 models around the state and they're around the country and they're all different. I know that in Massachusetts, they have an executive director 22 to 24 members of the staff and a five-member board that meets on a per DM basis. They receive and investigate 900 to 1200 complaints a year in Massachusetts. I don't expect that we would have anything close to that. But the fact of the matter is, you do have to, if you're gonna have an independent, it's gotta be independent of any state agency, of any elected office, I think it has to be it has to have a staff that has some authority to acquire the information that's necessary to investigate complaints. And then the board has to be given the authority to dole out punishment if you wanna call it. I do think that the real role of this group should be education first, hammer second. I don't think the hammer should be the one that we're holding over people's heads. I think we ought to be looking at how we educate people. I mean, do you think it's as much a matter of there's actually impropriety going on or do you think it's about the appearance and people's inability to be able to determine whether or not something is going on? In many cases, it is the appearance. And actually, if you look at most conflict of interest policies, it will say whether you have a direct or indirect or an appearance of a conflict. And that's the piece you've gotta address. And it's hard sometimes to write clear language, but I think we've got some pretty smart people in the building, we can probably do it. Now, Vermont is a really tiny state compared with others. And I mean, everybody seems to, at least here, it seems like everybody knows somebody or is in a relationship with somebody or is employed in some way. Do you think a conflict of interest policy is going to be challenging for a tiny state like Vermont? It may be, but that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. Excellent. I guess you would want folks to know from your perspective on this, sir? No, I just think that if you want to have good government, and to do that, you have to have open and transparent government. You have to be accountable and transparent. I do the Vermont transparency tour every other year. We do 12 to 15 stops on that throughout the state. And it's really about educating the public on the open meeting law, on the access to public records law. And that's what we're trying to do is just educate for Monters. Excellent. Switching gears for a second. You said that, yeah, we got town meeting coming up in like two weeks. What's that like for your office right now? Well, we will be open. We will be, someone will be on staff probably from about 5.30 or 6.00 in the morning until probably 10 or 11 at night. We'll have folks in the building and we will be receiving calls from town clerks and select boards on procedural issues, questions. And as they vote and if there are any problems with the election process. So we're available and ready to go. If we'll have vendors, members of our vending team that the machines come from the tabulating machines are available to us. So if there is a problem that we can send someone quickly to get that problem resolved. So it's a busy day for us and leading up to it. It gets busier every day. So do you find yourself fielding calls on the fly especially from towns that do, they still have the traditional floor meeting to be able to determine, hey, is this okay? Sometimes we do, sometimes we do. I mean, they have our cell phones and they know that they can call us and we'll have probably five to six people in the building working to answer the calls and try to respond as quickly as we can. Excellent, very nice. Secretary Connors, thank you so much for coming. You're welcome. I really appreciate it. And we'll be back in a moment. Welcome back. This week, lawmakers approved a bill that's going to allow for paid sick leave for all workers here in Vermont. Joining me to talk about this is Lindsey DeLaurier. She is the director of Main Street Alliance of Vermont. Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Sure, thank you. So tell us, what's going on with this? What's your interest in this? And yeah, what's going on? Well, I personally have been working on this issue for several years, maybe about five years. Most recently, I've been representing Main Street Alliance of Vermont. We are a nonprofit organization that works with small business owners around the state on public policy issues. And we have taken a supportive position on this issue. We've worked with a coalition of over 250 business owners in the state to look at the policy that was introduced originally, make recommendations for how to find the right balance for the issue to work for business owners and for workers. And the business owners I've been working with have done a great job of helping the legislature to sort of track that course and find a solution that obviously was the right solution for Vermont. Excellent. So can you just break down for us? How is this exactly going to work? When we're just going to kick in and how's it going to affect employers and employees? So the legislation is set to go into effect on January 1st of 2017. At that point, employees around the state will be able to begin accruing paid time off according to the legislation. Of course, for employers who already provide paid time off policies of any kind. So whether it's vacation, combined time, or sick leave, they won't really see an impact. They likely won't see any impact at all as long as employees can use their paid time for sick days. For employers who aren't currently providing sick leave on January 1st, their employees will begin to accrue, but there's a one year waiting period for new employees and a one year waiting period for all employees at the start of the legislation. I see. Very good. Now you said you work with small businesses and you had a coalition of about 250 of them. We heard some opposition on behalf of small businesses saying that this is going to hurt them. And in fact, there was an effort to exempt businesses of what five employees are fewer. Correct? Absolutely. The business community, there has been division in the business community on this issue. The business owners that we worked with were those who in principle supported the idea that there should be a minimum standard of paid time for all workers in Vermont. And then their objective was to figure out how to make that standard work for business owners. There are also business owners who feel that any new mandates on businesses or perhaps this particular mandate isn't the right thing for Vermont at the time. So there is division there, but the businesses that we work with supported it. Excellent, wonderful. You know the indication, how many businesses who supported it already offered this? By any chance? I mean, there certainly are, there must be a number of small businesses that currently already offer paid, paid sick leave. Absolutely. About half of the businesses in Vermont currently offer paid sick leave. That's according to a Department of Labor survey. In terms of the businesses on our coalition who we worked with, the majority of them did do provide sick leave, although there are a number of them, particularly in food service, interestingly, who are on our coalition who supported this legislation but don't currently offer it themselves. And the reason that I've heard cited for that is they want the level playing field. They want everyone to offer it when they offer it. Food service, the food service industry is an industry that is probably the least likely right now to provide paid time off. So this is an industry where you're gonna see a lot of impact from this legislation. And so for many of the owners who were on our coalition who didn't currently offer it, they felt that they were excited to have a standard where everyone was gonna be doing it. It was really gonna provide culture change and everyone would be doing it at the same time so there would be equality in terms of a competitive advantage. Yeah, and it's a bit ironic, isn't it that food service people are most likely to not have this time off because really your food handler is probably the one person you wanna make sure is healthy, correct? I think that's very ironic in terms of the public perspective, but I will say that one of the real drivers behind this legislation is precisely that, is the public health impacts of that. And so food service handlers, but not just that, people working in retail, coming into contact with the public, care providers, whether it's childcare, elder care, these are all areas where there's a significant portion of the workforce that don't currently have paid leave and obviously those are the sectors where you'd hope most to have people with paid leave because they're in contact with the public or with vulnerable populations. Very good, so you've achieved your goal here of Peyton and Sickley, what's next for Main Street Alliance? Well, we have a lot of things in the works. This year in the legislature, we're supporting the effort to ask the legislature to pass us financing for the Dr. Dinosaur expansion proposal, so the Dr. Dinosaur 2.0 campaign launched last fall. We're one of the organizations who are supporting that effort and we hope the legislature will finance a study to expand Dr. Dinosaur up through age 26. Very good, excellent. Lindsay, thank you so much for being on the show, I really appreciate it, it's been great. Great, thanks. Thank you very much. Okay. And thank you for watching this week of Capitol Beat.