by @BarryRafkind in Government Reform
Posted on December 25, 2009 at 8:50 pm
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To have an effective democratically-elected Government, the People must trust that their elected officials are acting as good stewards of public resources. This trust is hindered when people can not verify the integrity of candidates and office-holders.
In Somerville, all elected officials must file ethics / campaign finance reports which are presumably vetted by the Secretary of State’s office and then end up sitting in the paper records of Somerville’s Elections Department. In theory, any member of the public could go and review those papers, but in practice it would take too much time during the week that most folks don’t have, especially if you work a full-time job. I know it would be very time-intensive for City employees to manually enter this information into the computer, so therefore, the City should require that candidates file their reports electronically, so it all goes right into a database.
These records ought to be posted online in digital format. The Cambridge Elections Dept already lists its files with the state’s Office of Campaign & Political Finance, so why can’t we do it, too?
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I couldn’t agree with you more.
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Hi Barry,
Couple of interesting thing related to this.
When we passed the Ethics Reform Bill this past spring at the State House, we did include a provision related to this, which is a step in the right direction.
For cities greater than 40,000 residents (includes Somerville):
1) All mayoral candidates will now have to file electronically online through the state website.
2) All other candidates (including our Aldermen and School Committee candidates) will have their campaign finance reports scanned and posted on the municipal web sites within
30 days of a filing deadline if $1,000 is raised or spent in a reporting period.
3) Reports will now be required to be retained for six years (versus prior law which only required they be kept for the current term).
On a somewhat related note, as far as State Legislators go, our campaign finance reports are online (www.mass.gov/ocpf) and easily searchable. However, our ethics financial disclosure forms are not set up on a similar system in the Ethics Commission (just as ethics reports at the city level are difficult to obtain as you know). There was a really interesting project studying how different states fare on financial disclosures, and included in their report is an online database of all of our ethics reports through 2006. If you’re curious, that report is at http://www.publicintegrity.org/projects/entry/1522/.
Hope that helps!
Carl
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Thanks for sharing, Carl!
Did these provisions go into effect when Gov. Patrick signed the bill on July 1st, or will they activate later? Is any of it retroactive?
From the Public Integrity project, I see that Massachusetts scored 73.5, with a grade of C, to rank 17th among states. Are you or other legislators working to further strengthen our ethics laws?
Do items 1 and 3 also only refer to the campaign finance reports, like item 2? Or will the ethics reports also be included? Why weren’t ethics reports required of state legislators?
Any reason why non-mayoral candidates were exempted from electronic filing?
Posting scanned copies of reports is certainly an improvement over plain paper, but it would be even better if the data was submitted electronically from the get-go, so that all information could be indexed and searched with a database.
I wonder if a home rule petition would be required for Somerville to change its ethics procedures?
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Not a problem. In answer to your questions:
The changes to campaign finance laws take effect January 1, 2010. It is fairly standards to give time for the regulations to be updated and procedures put in place after a bill is signed into law. I don’t believe there is any retroactivity incorporated into these provisions.
As far as Massachusetts ranking in the report… the major overhaul of our ethics laws occured just this past year, which was after that study was completed. I don’t know how it would change our standing if the study were to be updated.
The ethics bill did require ongoing study of additional suggested improvements which is ongoing, but no definitive timetable. (for a summary of the ethics reform bill we passed this year, go to http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=ethmodulechunk&L=1&L0=Home&sid=Ieth&b=terminalcontent&f=Ethics_bill_announcement&csid=Ieth)
I am involved with other legislators in other transparency initiatives, including in our corporate tax expenditures. That wouldn’t alter the criteria used by this particular study, but has been raised by other studies showing Mass. needs some definitive improvements.
Items 1 & 3 do only cover campaign finance reports. The bill we passed covered several areas, including ethics, campaign finance, and lobbyist accountability. It is a pretty weighty bill with the scope it covers, but nonetheless not everything that should be included even gets on the table for consideration. I couldn’t say for certain why specific suggestions weren’t included, and frankly don’t recall whether they were even suggested in the amendment process.
For Somerville to change its ethics procedures, there may be things that the City could do via local ordinance. Anything that requires a charter change would need to be submitted via home rule petition.
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