SUN-TIMES
November 24, 2003
BY MARK BROWN

Ethics reforms score a real victory for voters

No law or combination of laws will ever be enough to persuade every public official to act honestly or ethically.

But I'll be darned if the Illinois General Assembly didn't go and pass legislation last week that ought to at least make a difference in the never-ending effort to box in the slippery ones.

Give yourself a hand, out there in voterland.

I don't know how you did it, but somehow or other, the word got out that you were fed up and that you weren't going to take it anymore.

I can't think of any other way to explain the ethics package that legislators approved during their veto session, adopting a beefed-up version of ethics reform favored by Gov. Blagojevich and doing him one better by adding a new financial disclosure requirement for the type of unpaid government advisers favored by his administration.

Illinois legislators have never really liked ethics proposals. Their collective attitude has been: If you don't like something they've done, you can punish them by voting them out of office. Just don't expect them to give some prosecutor the means to get them into real trouble. That's why it's always a surprise when they're persuaded to do something substantive on ethics.

I started to describe this as a "sweeping" ethics package, but that may overstate the case a little. What we've got here is a whole bunch of little things that, when added together, should help set a new tone for Illinois government:

*My favorite wrinkle is that state officials are now barred from including themselves in public service announcements, a sneaky method of self-promotion first popularized by Secretary of State George Ryan with his organ donor commercials, later copied by Jesse White, and also adapted by Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka in ads for her office's Bright Start college savings program.

These are worthy programs, but their success or failure should rise and fall on their own merits, not the degree to which a politician can use them to publicize himself or herself.

The ban doesn't apply to local officials, but maybe Cook County commissioners can follow suit in time to keep Treasurer Maria Pappas from plugging herself in further radio commercials for the bank her office uses to collect real estate tax payments.

*There also are some changes to the state's Gift Ban Act. When legislators enacted a gift ban in 1998, the last major ethics reform effort, they left open a number of exemptions, including one that preserved their right to accept free golf and tennis. The new law will cut off the golf and tennis.

(As you might guess, not many state lawmakers were whiling away the hours on a tennis court. Apparently, the tennis exemption originally had been included at the insistence of a state senator from the North Side, a tennis enthusiast who has since retired.)

*In addition, public officials are now prohibited from accepting any more than $75 a day in food and drinks. That's obviously plenty, especially in Springfield, where it's difficult to spend that much in a day, but it's an improvement on the previous unlimited exemption for wining and dining.

*The law leaves in place a dangerous exception for public officials to continue receiving gifts "on the basis of personal friendship," although it tries to tighten that down a little by advising the recipient to consider the circumstances: such as whether the gift-giver will be claiming a tax deduction for the cost of the gift.

Yes, that probably should be a tipoff. It would be very interesting if we ever could require public officials some day to at least disclose the gifts they receive from "friends."

*State employees in the executive and legislative branches will now have to submit time sheets to account for their work hours, an overdue little piece of documentation that would have come in handy for federal prosecutors trying to sort through the way state workers slip back and forth between their government jobs and campaign jobs.

*Other laws approved last week will prohibit state workers from doing political work on state time and prevent them from receiving taxpayer-financed bonuses for their campaign work.

Some of this is closing the barn door after the horses got out, and you could argue that somebody always figures out a new way to pry open the door again, but every little bit helps.

Many think the most important aspect of this law is the portion about which I am least enthusiastic--if only because I want to wait and see how it works in practice.

*That is the creation of a new system of ethics commissions and inspectors general -- one each for the governor, secretary of state, attorney general, comptroller, treasurer and auditor general and another for the General Assembly.

These will have broad powers to conduct investigations and impose penalties. We've never had anything like it.

It all seems a bit convoluted to me. Everybody had to have their own commission and inspector general because nobody trusted the other guy not to use the power as a political battering ram.

But honest state employees will finally have a place to take their complaints -- and maybe get them acted upon. There's another provision that protects them from retaliation.

Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Political Reform, had been working toward these changes for three years. Canary is the do-gooder to whom news reporters invariably turn when they need someone to provide righteous indignation over some irregularity they are exposing.

Usually, she'll say something along the lines that the described activity doesn't look proper to her, but she'll have to add that there's no law against it. Now, there is.

"With this bill, we've got some lines we can draw in the sand," Canary said.

We need to draw some more lines: more detailed economic interest statements from public officials for starters.

But this is progress -- the kind you get when the public makes known its discontent.
Take a bow.

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