 Vermont PBS, in cooperation with Orca Media and the Vermont Press Bureau, presents Capital Beat, the Week in Review, from the Vermont State House. Here's host, Neil Goswami. Welcome, everyone, to Capital Beat. I'm Neil Goswami with the Vermont Press Bureau. We are now well into the second month of the legislative session, and there are a number of bills that are moving to the floor of each chamber, the House and the Senate. One of those bills has been passed already by the Senate. It's a piece of legislation that deals with ethics and the creation of an ethics commission here in Vermont. And joining me today to discuss this bill and the merits of this bill are Secretary of State James Kondos and Senator Jeanette White of Wyndham County. Thank you both so much for being here. Thank you for having us. It'll be a fun discussion about ethics today, I hope. Senator White, your committee, Government Operations, has moved this piece of legislation fairly quickly through the committee and through the Senate now. It's been passed, and it heads over to the House. Can you give us a brief overview of what the new requirements are, what the new restrictions are on legislators, members of the administration, etc.? So, first let me tell you that it moved through quickly, but we did a lot of work on it in the last biennium. So, a number of people had already... So, we weren't starting at the very beginning of a new bill. We had done a lot of work last year. The Senate actually passed a bill last year. We actually passed a bill last year. So, what we did is take the bill that we passed last year and started there and then made changes to it. So, it really does four things. One, is it prohibits certain employment after leaving office, either for legislators or executive officers? It requires financial disclosures from candidates. And it imposes restrictions on contracting and campaign contributions. So, it's often called the pay-to-play provision, and then it establishes a state ethics commission. Right. So, it does those four things. Okay. Now, why are these things necessary? And let me say in the past, I believe you and others have said that you weren't quite sure if the state needed stronger ethics legislation or an ethics commission to sort of review complaints. What do you think has changed? Or why has the discussion changed to, why do we need one essentially? Well, I think that there are a couple things. The first three provisions that I talked about have always, don't have anything to do with the ethics commission necessarily. So, I think that a number of people have always felt that when a legislator leaves office, there should be some kind of a cooling off period before they become a lobbyist. And the same with executive officers. And the administration since Governor Snelling has had an executive order against members of the executive branch doing certain jobs after their employment. So, those have always kind of been of a concern and the financial disclosure. I think there's more pressure to know where people are getting their income so that we know where they might have some conflicts of interest. Not necessarily how much they make, but so I think those have always been issues. And then it just became more apparent that the trust in government has gone down, down, down, down, down. And the VPR survey that was done a while ago showed that I think it's 89% of Vermonters had little or no confidence in their state government to do what was best for them. So, I think it was time for us to have something. Pretty remarkable numbers. The flip side of that would mean only 11% have some level of trust in state government, which is not a good number. Pugh has been doing this since 1958. And in 1958, almost 80% of the population had faith that their government was going to act on their behalf. Okay. Secretary Kondos, you've been a long time proponent of stronger ethics measures here in Vermont in an ethics commission. Now, before we get into your thoughts on the merits of what has been passed in the Senate, tell me a little bit about why you think this is necessary in Vermont. Well, I think just, you know, I served as a senator. I served 18 years as a city counselor in South Burlington. And I could just see the tide changing over time as far as that trust in government. And I think that it just has been really exasperated in the last probably five, six years. It's really gotten bad. Excuse me. And, you know, I do want to say that I really appreciate everything that Senate GovOps under the leadership of my former colleague, Senator White. We served on the committee together when I was chair of that committee. And then she immediately followed me as chair. But, and I understand the hard work that goes into crafting legislation. So, you know, I think they deserve a lot of credit for being able to get something through the Senate. Okay. So now to the merits of what the Senate has passed. You have been somewhat critical that it does not go far enough. So what is it about this legislation that does not do enough? Well, I can probably sum it up in three things. If you look at the four bullets that Senator White brought up, the first three I'm in complete agreement with. I think those are something that everybody's been talking about for a few years. It was mainly done by, for instance, with the state officers. It was done as a code of ethics that was signed by appointees of the governor. So, as far as the ethics commission itself is, I, when I became secretary and I started attending meetings with my counterparts and recognizing what was going on around the country and where we, where we actually ranked. And we were like 49th or 50th in the country. There were 47 states that had ethics commissions. Vermont did not, was one of three that did not. And I realized that even there is a cost to that trust and it's a sacred trust that we should hold, hold dearly. And, and I think that it was, it was just a matter of my, you know, it was something that I just supported right from the beginning. And there were three points that I think I would make that, that I believe that the ethics commission should have. One is independence, two is authority, and three is resources. So, let's get into independence, authority and resources, Senator. In terms of independence, what can you tell us about the independence of this commission? From my understanding, it relies on the Attorney General's office to do any real investigative work. Is that? Not so. Okay, so tell us how this will work. Well, first of all, if I can say that this is, it's hard to talk about that without kind of explaining the way it's set up. It is independent in the sense that it isn't appointed by the governor. And I have to say that many of the ethics commissions around the country are appointed by the governor, so they don't seem very independent to me. This one, the, the members of the commission itself would be appointed by the Supreme Court Justice, the Chief Justice, the Vermont Bar Association, ACLU, Society of CPA Professionals, and Human Resource Professionals. So they're kind of independent of us. So that, it's set up there. It lives in the executive branch because everything has to live someplace. So that's where it lives, but it's not dependent. It isn't independent. If you, if you think about them having to have authority and independent investigative and enforcement, then you're right. It, at this point, doesn't have that independence. And if I can just make a comment about the, the low grades that we get, the Center for Public Integrity gives us a D plus. First of all, there are only five states that get above a D, I think. So, and New Jersey is one of them. So if we're grading on a curve, we're all right. Right, we're not too bad. But here are some of the questions. If you go deep into this, here's judicial accountability. We get an F on that because we, of the way we appoint and retain our judges. I don't know if they want them elected or what, but so we get an F on that. We get an F on legislative accountability because one of the questions is, and this, this is kind of an example of what they do. One of the questions is, do you have, do legislators have a nepotism policy for hiring their legislative staff? Well, no, we don't have a policy for hiring our legislative staff because we don't have any legislative staff. So why would we have a policy? Those are the kinds of, if you look deep into what the questions are, are, are we audited every year? That's, that's one of the legislators. Are our assets audited every year? Well, no, we're a citizen legislature. I don't have anybody audit our assets every year. That's, so we get an F. Okay. So where was I? So I think the point you're making is, many of these mechanisms that are used to judge states do not apply to Vermont. I believe they do not apply. And I do think that we should have some kind of an ethics commission. What we've, what we've decided is it's important to have one place for citizens to be able to go to, either file a complaint or to ask, say, I believe that there's a violation here. So that is the ethics commission. That's the director. It's a part-time director. That's true. But we don't know what the need is out there yet. So we're not going to, we're not going to set up a full-fledged ethics commission until we know what the need is, because they, we fund them and they'll be looking for things to justify their existence. And so let's find out what the, nah, we heard that from more than one source. So let's find out what the need is first. So what happens is that the complaint comes in. If it's a complaint, a campaign violation, campaign finance violation, yes, it goes to the AG's office for investigation. If it's against a state employee, it goes to HR. If it's against, if it's a certain allegation against a legislator, it goes to the commission itself. If it's a judicial branch, it goes to the judicial conduct board. So it goes and then it comes back. Then we can see in the end, there'll be a report. How many, how many complaints were there? How many, how many were resolved? What was the resolution of them? Do we need to go further or don't we need to go further? And they'll be charged with doing education and training annually for legislators and state employees. Then we can, we can say, let's, let's try and stem it before it becomes an issue. And so. Well, Mr. Secretary, I saw a head shake in there in the negative direction. You mentioned independence, authority and funding. The senator covered independence and perhaps made a valid argument for many viewers. Authority and funding might be still in question here. She mentioned the attorney general's office would take more serious cases perhaps that. No, no, no, the attorney general's office will investigate campaign finance complaints. That's where they go now. Sure. But there'll be this funnel through which they can go. The human resources will do. Any allegations against employees and and that probably isn't ideal. But can we take care of issues without having? I mean, if we see. Well, then the funding funding is laid out for two years. A general, I think 2% 2 point something. It's base. It's it's it ends up being about $100,000, which comes off the top of every agency. Yeah, it's a formula that but it sunsets after two years. So this is the commission as prepared. What does the ideal ethics commission look like to you? Actually, the makeup of the commission I think is fine. I think that the five member panel. I think they did a good job in coming up with an independent panel from that standpoint. When I talk about independence, it's not just the independence of those five individuals. It's the independence of the organization. The ethics organization and and and from my standpoint, they need to be independent of any state. In other words, they should not be under the influence of of any state elected official, which if you're in the AG's office, that's an elected official. If you're in my office, it's an elected official. If it's if you're in the HR office, it's an elected official governor. So and when I speak of authority when I'm what I'm saying is that that I think that they should have at least one investigator that can actually investigate these complaints that can actually look at and have power to to request information. In some cases, it was subpoena power has been raised as an issue. And then but and then again, of course, the resources is they need enough funding and I don't think a hundred thousand dollars does a whole lot. Just the list that that Senator White listed off. I think the education and training part just getting prepared for that and actually doing education and training for individuals will will eat up that hundred thousand by itself. I also want to say that the I believe that it should be. And that and I ideally I think it is set up now to deal with both House or the legislative and the executive branch. But I've also insisted that it should also include the municipal branch. Current law in the municipal under municipal law allows for a town to to create a conflict of interest policy. It's enabling legislation only. And their best guess that we have from VLCT is that it's only about a third of the towns actually have a conflict of interest policy. We've asked that at a minimum they should be mandated to to have a conflict of interest policy. And and I don't believe that they need to wait to 2020. They can pass that in three weeks. It's not that big a deal. In fact, VLCT has a model model ordinance or policy for for towns to use. So I think that there is there's opportunity to do that. I don't think they need three years to to for towns to do that. And we we our office receives. We just calculated it because VLCT had asked us for this information. And we calculated that the average is about three three ethics questions about ethics in local communities per week and or per month. No per week per week. And I think that it's it's incumbent upon us to deal with the issue. When I first started talking about this, I actually checked with Massachusetts because they I was giving them as a pretty good example. They had they had a three million dollar budget. They had 22 people, mostly lawyers, which which obviously doesn't fit the Vermont size just even on the population. But they had three quarters of their complaints were coming at the municipal level. And I believe that the same will happen here. So, Senator, if there is general agreement in the Senate that it makes sense to have a municipal level conflict of interest policy. Why why delay it for three years? We could have put it sooner. I've been on a small town select board. I was on for nine years and some some select boards meet once a month and not during the summer. And I think that their lives are getting more and more complicated just as the legislators lives are getting more and more complicated with the issues. And they could just adopt the the model policy if they wanted to. But I believe that if they're going to adopt a policy instead of just saying, OK, tonight we're going to adopt the conflict of interest policy that the VLCT sent us. Here it is. I think they should have the conversation. They should have the conversation and say, what does this mean in our town? Not not what does it mean in Burlington or what does it mean in Winooski? But what does it mean in our town to have a conflict of interest policy? And I think that that conversation is as important as adopting the policy itself. I think the conversation is important, but three years does seem a bit excessive to have that conversation. Would it would you be opposed if the House decided it should be one year instead of three years? I probably wouldn't be opposed to it. I my guess is the House isn't going to make it there. They happen to be closer to their towns than than the people in the Senate. But I mean, this is I suppose you could put it. I wouldn't put it before. Let's see. This is 2017, right? So it's even if this passes and is signed, it wouldn't go into effect until July. Right. So you could do a 2018 July start date. You could. You could. All right. We're making progress here. I'm bringing you two closer together. We are closer together. I wouldn't oppose it, but I do think that we need to give them time to have the conversations at the town level. And for those towns who meet once a month and who have three people who volunteer five people to volunteer and they come in and there's a lot of things they have to be dealing with. And I want them to have the conversation and not just to say we're going to pass this. Yeah, we're going to adopt this policy. Well, I can tell you that just in the last couple weeks, we had a complaint called into us that a particular town had had a conflict of interest policy. And actually voted to eliminate that conflict of interest policy and then turned around and gave their select board chair a leading role in a position in town. So, you know, I still maintain that we really need to and I'm I served on the Vermont League of Cities and Towns Board. I served on the National League of Cities and Towns Board, you know, and I served for 18 years at the local level. I believe that there needs to be a conflict of interest policy mandate going to them. It doesn't cost them anything to do, right? And we I I don't care what the date is. We have mandated that they have one. Yeah, we haven't mandated what it is. And so I again, firmly believe that that conversation should happen about what it means in their town. You have a town of 500 people. The conflict of interest policy is going to be very different than the conflict of interest policy. Yeah, I'd like to talk about some of the some of the other requirements that you mentioned that off the top. There is some new financial disclosure requirements. What are we now asking lawmakers and high level executive branch appointees? Let me make sure what we're asking. All right. We're high. The statewides are going to be required statewide candidates will be required to submit. The prior years, 1040s with personal information redacted. Is it just the prior year? Or is it a prior year? OK, and my understanding is that candidates have been doing that a lot. But some of them have done so on a voluntary basis, right? They don't know. Should they shouldn't they should I do by wife? Should I do, you know, if you file separately, right? So that's the requirement for statewides. In addition, statewides and general assembly candidates will have to disclose a few things. Any sources of income or investment income from investments over 10,000, not the amount just the source. So if you get in my case, I would write state of Vermont and I would write social security. And if there if I have a job during the summer and I make more than 10, I would write that. How specific will these requirements be if I would I have to name the company, the specific company that pays me if I'm elected lawmaker? If that's your source of income, OK, you'd have to say I work for Burlington Gas and Electric or I work for the Brattleboro Housing Authority. OK, yes, you will identify it would say who it is, not how much you make. And then if you get in investment income, income, not investments, but income from investments over $10,000 from a single investment, you would write that down. So you'd write Coca-Cola, $10,000. If you got five, if you got five, $5,000 incomes from five different sources, you wouldn't write that down. So the goal here is to see where people might be being influenced from. But why I mean somebody who earns $10,000 off of an investment might have less interest in pushing a particular agenda than somebody who earns $1.5 million. And say Legislature A makes $10,001 from the investment and Legislature B makes $1.5 million. We won't know that there's a drastically drastic difference between the two. Shouldn't there be, would it make sense to have a little more range built into this? That was suggested, ranges were suggested. We determined that we would just put anything over $10,000. Is that a smart move, Secretary? I will just leave that as a policy decision that the Legislature has to make. But I do want to add one thing and I think my colleague would be supportive of this. As long as we're putting state-wide and whatever for our tax returns, which I have no problem with, but maybe we should also require that of the presidential candidates that they supply us with their previous year. I've got that bill introduced. Becca Ballant and I have that bill introduced. Actually it's five years, I believe. Which interestingly enough, most people would think of President Donald Trump, but this would have impacted our very own Senator Bernie Sanders as well. So no, I don't know if it should be arranged, but I do, I think that at least beginning, let's see if this makes a difference and let's see if people, and then you also have to declare things like if you earn, if you own more than 10% of a company. Right. And that 10% came from CPAs. They said that's a standard that they use when they're dealing with influence and with their clients. We have just a couple of minutes left. Oh, I'm sorry. But I want to ask you again also about the one-year ban on executive branch employees and legislators from registering as lobbyists. Why one year? How did you settle on one year? Out of the year. No. You could do, there are some states that have lifetime bans. We certainly didn't want to do that. And we didn't want to impact people's opportunities to get jobs too much. It's a small state. There's not a lot of opportunities for employment in the state. And some people thought it should be for one full biennium. We settled on a year. Mr. Secretary, is that a decent... I think that's, you know, as the senator said, it is a small state. And there aren't a lot of high-paying jobs out there that go along with some of the ones that you would have as a state commissioner or secretary. So I think you don't want to force people to have to move out of state to take a job. And I think that it does make sense to have some kind of a cooling off period. I do think, and I believe this is the case in the bill, is that it's only in regards to stuff that was under their control. So... That's for the executive officers. Okay. For them advocating before certain public bodies, which is additional. They are limited from becoming a lobbyist of any sort for a year as our legislators. That provision is for them advocating in front of, not as a lobbyist necessarily, but yeah. So I am down to about 20 seconds now, but it's a one-way street. Lobbyists, excuse me, legislators and executive branch employees can't become lobbyists, but a lobbyist could become an executive branch employee or a lobbyist. Sure. We can't tell people they can't be on the ballot. Right, right. Okay. Very good. My thanks to Secretary of State Jim Condos and Senator Jeanette White. Thanks. Thanks for this riveting discussion on ethics. I appreciate it. Thank you. And on behalf of everyone at Orca Media and Vermont PBS, I'm Neil Goswami with the Vermont Press Bureau. We thank you for watching and we hope you join us again next week.