Every last penny of tax payer funds whould be made available online for all to see!
Last week, the Monroe County Legislature adopted legislation submitted by County Executive Maggie Brooks as a “matter of urgency” to fill a vacancy on the three-member county Board of Ethics.
Brooks selected her finance director, Scott Adair, who happens to be the younger brother of the legislature’s president, Jeffrey Adair. It might smell of patronage at first blush, but it is worth noting that legislators on both sides of the aisle saluted the younger Adair as a capable man of impeccable integrity.
The issue was a Democrat and Chronicle request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law for copies of annual financial disclosure forms. The eight-page form requires all elected county officials and high-level employees to divulge such information as their sources of income, gifts and reimbursements they may have received, and securities holdings. Some questions require a value on the interests, delineated by a letter corresponding to a category of dollar amount. (For example, A is for amounts under $5,000, whereas D is for those over $100,000.)
The forms are open to the public — with some limitation — and their purpose is to compel people in positions of authority to disclose interests that may conflict with their official duties. Whether a conflict exists is determined by the Board of Ethics, which is charged with reviewing the forms every year.
Under the county charter, the county may delete all values and dollar amounts. A county attorney, Neha Stowe, recently assured employees in an email obtained by the Democrat and Chronicle that all values would be deleted.
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In the same email, however, Stowe wrote that employees may request, under the state’s General Municipal Law Section 813(9)(h), that the Board of Ethics delete additional information.
That statute, which was written into the county charter but has since expired, refers to a temporary state commission on local government ethics and local advisory panels dating to the late 1980s and early 1990s that no longer exists.
County spokesman Noah Lebowitz reasoned that since the statute is in the charter, the charter provides county employees “the added protection of petitioning the Board of Ethics to request that additional information from the financial disclosure forms be redacted.”
The email noted that, “It is not guaranteed that additional requests for redaction will be accepted.”
Robert Freeman, the director of the state Committee on Open Government, said the Freedom of Information Law could be construed to justify deleting dollar amounts from the forms, in that revealing them could be considered an unwarranted invasion of privacy.
He added, though, that deletions beyond dollar amounts must be limited to information that has no material bearing on the employee’s duties.
“There may be some items that so and so would want to have redacted that do have a bearing on the performance of their duties,” Freeman said, “and in those situations the ethics board should not have the authority to redact an item of that nature.”
Lebowitz said the majority of requests for additional deletions came from criminal justice lawyers who want to protect the names of their children.
That seems reasonable enough. In asking for these forms, the Democrat and Chronicle is not interested in identifying children or the stake an employee’s spouse might have in a family dairy in Wisconsin.
The Democrat and Chronicle is interested in keeping tabs on legislators and policy makers as they shape the future of Monroe County. That, too, seems reasonable enough.
In the same email, however, Stowe wrote that employees may request, under the state’s General Municipal Law Section 813(9)(h), that the Board of Ethics delete additional information.
That statute, which was written into the county charter but has since expired, refers to a temporary state commission on local government ethics and local advisory panels dating to the late 1980s and early 1990s that no longer exists.
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