2006-12-13 Board of Ethics Minutes Regular Session

Home

Board of Ethics Minutes - Regular Session December 13, 2006 I included the county vehicle example because this came up where somebody's personal vehicle was in the repair shop. They said "Well I am going to use the county vehicle this weekend" and I said "No, you can't." I think the only people who can use the county vehicle all the time is civil defense or the Mayor and that is because they are on 24 -hour call. For everybody else in the world, if your car is in the shop you have to rent a vehicle or borrow a car. Just because you happen to have a county vehicle issued to you doesn't give you the right to use it for personal reasons. You can use it for county business, but this weekend if you want to go to Kona to shop at Costco you can't use the county vehicle. If you have to go to Kona to inspect a sewage treatment facility or something, then you can use the county vehicle on the weekend. I wanted to include this because the question had come up and there has been public concern about the use of county vehicles. AL: Like on Sunday afternoon, right. BLT: Yeah, so it's real clear that you can use your vehicle if it is on the way. Driving from home to work, you can drop your kids off. On your way home, you can pick your kids up, or you can stop at supermarket and shop because it is in transit. AL: We don't have that many roads, right? BLT: Yeah, but that wouldn't mean you could drive to Costco on your way home from Hilo and then drive back to Hilo. That would be out of the way. KS: In general, my feeling is that these kinds of printed materials should be very, very brief and reflect the exact language extracted from the code, or the Ethics Code. Interpretive statements should be clearly marked, like put in italics, because if... my experience is when a union person gets a hold of this your interpretation becomes fact and law, or part of the contract or something you never intended. It has some kind of status and it can be picked apart, and I think that this kind of background material is good for classroom discussion but to put it in writing there as an example.... BLT: A lot of this has been taken from publications by the State Ethics Commission with similar language. Some of it has been taken from, like the examples of prohibited activity, specific cases. AL: Well maybe if we just said examples. You want it set apart? KS: Yeah, italics. What does that mean. AL: Examples of it. KS: The stuff that is the wording of the ethics code or county code should be in regular type, but interpretive explanatory materials should be in italics or quotations or something like that.