Sketchy law needs revamping

We recently ran a story about Lisbon resident Russell Finley filing an ethics complaint in St. Lawrence County that dealt with the hiring of a guy who is related to someone that person works under. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20100324/NEWS05/303249969

That’s basically all the story said. We told you who filed the complaint and about the perceived conflict Mr. Finley sees in the hiring of Timothy Bacon to a job in a department where his mom is a bigwig.

The response from readers was pretty strong. I’ll paraphrase a few of the comments left by readers of the story on our Web site:

- Russell Finley is an idiot.

- Russell Finley is an upstanding citizen.

- County officials are corrupt.

- There’s nothing new about nepotism in county politics.

- There’s nothing wrong with hiring the most qualified person, no matter who is his mother.

- I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.

- Nah, nah, boo, boo, I can’t hear you.

These are generally the comments we get whenever a story is published. A third of the audience is on one side of the issue. A third of the audience is on the other side. And a third is doing the written equivalent of spitting up baby food on their bibs.

What is most interesting is that the comments generated by the story often have very little to do with what the story is about. Reporter Beth Graham’s piece about Mr. Finley’s complaint is as good of an example of this as it gets.

The story was not an indictment of county officials. It did not serve as judge or jury as to the merits of Mr. Finley’s complaint. It did not suggest that anyone was right or wrong, idiotic or upstanding.

It just said that the Ethics Board created in July has received its first complaint. And that the Ethics Board, closing in on a year later, so far doesn’t exist. Oh, and even if it did, it might never get to consider Mr. Finley’s complaint because the law gives the power of determining a complaint’s merits to one person – the county attorney.

No jokes about the ethics of attorneys, please. This is serious business.

It doesn’t matter that the person who decides whether a complaint will be forwarded to the Ethics Board is an attorney. But it does matter that the law which created the ethics review process gives one person the authority to kill a complaint before anyone else sees it.

The law to check ethics starts with no way to check if the first step in the process is being handled ethically. How’s that for ironic? How's that for dumb?

The county started out with the very reasonable idea of creating a process to ensure that ethical expectations of its workers and officials weren’t being breached. Great plan. Poor execution.

That’s the news here. It’s not about whether Mr. Finley or county officials are sketchy. It is about the hugely flawed system that is in place – sort of – to determine such things.

Legislators need to consider taking their good intentions and putting them to work to retool a bad ethics law.

The first step is appointing the members of the Ethics Board that they for some reason waited six months or so to start trying to fill and have yet to get up and running. Then they need to eliminate the county attorney’s screening of complaints and let the Ethics Board do its job.

It makes more sense for the Ethics Board as a whole to determine whether a complaint needs to be investigated or tossed aside as frivolous.

Russell Finley’s complaint seems to pass the eye test: It looks like something that is at least worth investigating. Not by Mr. Finley. Not by the public. Not by someone who believes either the accused or the accuser is inherently crooked. But by an Ethics Board armed with a better law.

The only things we’re missing are the Ethics Board and the better law. Legislators can fix those things. I hope they don’t just cover their ears and say, “Nah, nah, boo, boo, we can’t hear you.”