Group gears up for ethics inquiries
Posted on Sunday, July 27, 2008
Graham Sloan anticipates a lot of mail this fall.
As executive director of the Arkansas Ethics Commission, he sees complaints surge in the months and weeks leading up to an election. And generally, the filers are antsy to hear back.
He recalls one candidate who sent in a complaint via FedEx, tracked its arrival on the Internet, and then called him about a minute after the package arrived.
“I see that you’re in receipt of my complaint,” Sloan recalled the candidate saying. “When will y’all be holding a press conference to say my opponent is in violation of the law ?”
It doesn’t quite work like that.
Sloan’s staff looks into the accusations, which range from nit-picky oversights to egregious violations. Then the Ethics Commission itself decides whether they merit fines or other punishments.
The commission was established in 1991 to enforce Arkansas laws regarding campaign finance, lobbying, ethics, conflicts of interest and disclosures of committees working for and against ballot questions.
The commission investigates complaints filed by others but also initiates its own. The staff has looked into an average of 105 cases per year in the past decade. The number has fluctuated but is gen- erally higher in election years as supporters of candidates file allegations against opponents as elections near.
At times it can be pretty obvious what the filer’s motivations might be — when the news satellite trucks arrive before the complaint does, for example — but the claims are investigated regardless of the reason, Sloan said.
Political enemies trying to embarrass opponents goes with the territory, Sloan said.
“Nobody ever comes down and files a complaint against their best friend,” he added.
The commission dismisses complaints that it deems have no merit, but many are legitimate allegations requiring enforcement action.
For example, Paul Stephens of Gould filed a complaint in 2006 against then-Mayor Lloyd Parks, who was running what would be an unsuccessful re-election campaign against Stephens’ sister-inlaw. Of course he wanted Parks to lose, Stephens said, but that didn’t mean the complaint wasn’t legitimate.
The commission fined Parks $ 500 and issued him a public letter of warning for violations Stephens brought up, including Parks allowing his cousin access to the mayor’s office to prepare and print campaign fliers on a city-owned computer.
Greenwood Mayor Kenneth Edwards paid a $ 600 fine and was issued a public letter of reprimand in 2006 for, among other things, using campaign funds to buy items such as boots and a cowboy hat.
His former opponent, Garry Campbell, said he filed that complaint well after the election after hearing reports from people around town. Campbell lost the election by 39 votes and wonders whether the reprimand from the Ethics Commission might have made a difference.
The fine in that case was relatively high. The maximum at the time was $ 1, 000 per violation, though the Legislature raised that to $ 2, 000 last year.
The commission can issue fines and / or letters of caution, warning and reprimand. The letter of reprimand is the strongest rebuke.
Sloan said the highest fine he’s aware of was the $ 2, 500 levied last year against John Harris, former executive director of the state Board of Architects, in a case involving improper travel reimbursements. The $ 2, 500 represented five $ 500 fines.
That was in addition to two $ 1, 000 fines the commission levied against Harris in 2006.
It usually takes months to resolve such an investigation, which can be troublesome for candidates eventually found to have done nothing wrong.
Lt. Gov. Bill Halter said that’s an “unfortunate part of the process” that he learned in 2006. During the hard-fought Democratic primary that year, one of his opponents, Mike Hathorn of Huntsville, filed 13 complaints against Halter, alleging 154 ethics violations.
The 11-page complaint accused Halter of transferring money from his governor’s race to his campaign account for lieutenant governor. At the time Halter’s spokesman called the filing “a clear publicity stunt.”
The commission dismissed all the allegations in July 2006, two months after the primary.
“The mere fact that they’re untrue sometimes doesn’t help, because they’ve already gotten the headline,” Halter said of a strategy in filing ethics complaints. He said he has never filed one.
Hathorn said last week that his complaints “served a purpose,” though he said the Ethics Commission was correct in dismissing them. He said calling attention to the issue might have kept Halter from moving money from his aborted gubernatorial campaign to help in the lieutenant governor’s race.
As for the publicity he got out of it, including articles in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Hathorn said it didn’t help much.
“In reality, I caught a lot of heat from people for doing it,” he said. “We got publicity, but not necessarily the kind we wanted.”
However, he doesn’t regret filing the complaints, he said.
“I don’t think it was a bad decision because we had to make sure he went by the rule,” Hathorn said.
By the time the complaint was dismissed, Halter had won the Democratic nomination and was facing a fall campaign against a Republican. Hathorn supported Halter in that campaign.
Dennis Milligan, chairman of the Republican Party of Arkansas, said it makes sense that the number of ethics complaints goes up around election time. That’s when people are focused on campaigns and the actions of candidates that are governed by the ethics laws.
When he was the Saline County Republican chairman in 2006, he filed an ethics complaint against the Democratic sheriff’s candidate, Don Birdsong. The commission found that Birdsong had received a campaign contribution from the Saline County Democratic Party more than the maximum $ 2, 000 and had failed to report the contribution of a supporter who hosted Birdsong’s campaign Web site.
The commission issued Birdsong a public letter of caution but didn’t fine him. Birdsong had already reimbursed the county party by that time, almost two months after the election.
Milligan said last week that he was satisfied with the outcome, “a slap on the hand, if you will.”
“I’m going to say that wasn’t the crime of the century,” Milligan said.
He said there was some local media coverage of the ethics complaint.
“In the heat of battle, you want to bring attention that this individual has done something that, in your opinion, is wrong,” he said. “As county chairman, I felt like it was my responsibility to bring this to the public eye.”
Birdsong lost and the Republican incumbent, Phil Mask, won. Milligan said it wasn’t because of the ethics complaint, but it may have helped.
He said such complaints are fair game in politics and candidates should be very careful to follow ethics rules. Someone’s watching their every move, he said.
“Is it right ? Is it nit-picking ? Again, you understand the game when you enter it,” he said. “When you run for public office, the same instruction needs to be given that’s given in a boxing match. That’s to protect yourself at all times.”
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