Mar 12, 2007
Ethics Panel Shuts Doors
Mark Johnson - Charlotte Observer

The General Assembly created North Carolina's new state ethics commission last year as part of sweeping ethics reforms aimed at restoring public confidence amid the Jim Black scandals. 
 
So when, in the course of an ethics commission investigation of a public official, will the public learn what happened? 
 
"I think there's a good possibility never," said retired Superior Court Judge Robert Farmer, the commission's chair. 
 
The new ethics law requires the commission to keep its proceedings closed to the press and public, unless the accused asks for a public hearing. 
Farmer said the law's language also makes it likely the result of the commission's investigation and any penalty will remain secret. 
 
House Speaker Joe Hackney led the passage of the new law as a committee chairman last year. He said the bill had "50 moving parts" and the disclosure portion may not have gotten extensive attention. 
"All of our enactments bear some re-examination after they've gone into effect and we see how they work," Hackney said Friday. "Maybe this one does as well." 
 
He cautioned, though, that a goal of the law was to encourage legitimate ethics complaints. Earlier disclosure likely discourages some reports, Hackney said. 
 
Other General Assembly leaders who shepherded the new ethics law through the legislature said ethics investigations are closed, just as grand jury investigations are kept secret and for similar reasons. Confidentiality protects the accused against baseless complaints aimed only at generating negative publicity. 
 
"It's a balance of maintaining confidence in the system, being as open as we can and maintaining confidentiality, particularly for charges that are unsupported or insubstantial," said Rep. Rick Glazier, a Democrat from Fayetteville and the top House member on the General Assembly's own, separate, ethics committee. 
 
Last year, before the new ethics law passed, the state ethics commission was a board, a smaller organization that operated under the guidelines of a nearly 30-year-old governor's executive order. It heard a complaint against Gov. Mike Easley in open session with a small crowd of spectators and the news media. The board members deliberated in private and then announced their decision. 
 
That can't happen under the new law, Farmer said. 
"My preference was to do it like we did under the governor's order, with the hearings open and the deliberations closed, like a jury," he said. "The legislature didn't want it that way." 
 
Louisa Warren, director of the N.C. Coalition for Government and Lobbying Reform, said some parts of the ethics system must be available to the public in order to hold the system accountable. 
 
"If it's independent but shrouded in secrecy, there's no way to tell if it's doing its job -- policing and being the watchdog of ethics," said Warren, whose group was a primary advocate for the new ethics law. 
 
The first versions of the ethics legislation last year kept ethics complaints confidential while the commission investigated. Once the commission concluded there was probable cause, however, a public hearing would be scheduled. 
 
Senate leaders changed that, making the entire process secret until after the commission makes a recommendation to the accused's employer and the employer takes disciplinary action. 
 
The commission, for example, could investigate a complaint against an official with a state agency and recommend that agency punish the employee. The agency could impose any of a host of reprimands that are not public actions, such as putting a letter of reprimand in the person's personnel file. 
 
Criminal allegations would be forwarded to law enforcement and could later become public 
When a complaint involves a legislator, the state ethics commission determines if it appears legitimate but then sends the case to the legislative ethics committee. That group of lawmakers could dismiss the complaint or issue a private reprimand, neither of which would be disclosed. That is essentially the same process the legislature has followed since 1975. 
 
Hugh Stevens, a veteran First Amendment lawyer in Raleigh, said a large part of the penalty in an ethics complaint is that it becomes public knowledge. Lawyers, for example, would worry little about any ethics sanction, short of losing their license, by the state bar if it were kept under wraps, he said. 
 
"It's the proverbial tree falling in the forest," Stevens said, "and nobody hears it."