2007-01-10 Board of Ethics Minutes Regular Session

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Board of Ethics Minutes of Regular Session January 10, 2007 RW: Do we need to talk about this with Lincoln? WJ: Yeah, well I think he wanted to come in to comment on both of them. RW: Then I will second this. KS: We can't talk about this anymore? WJ: Yeah, we can. It is just that before we accept and file I think we should wait until he comes. BLT: One of the things that I don't believe this board has adopted, or reviewed is how long its records are maintained. KS: I couldn't find anything. BLT: Because, it just says that the Office of the Corporation Counsel maintains your records. It triggers two thoughts. You don't publish opinions except when they are public, in the sense that someone does not ask for a closed hearing as in the case of the hearing on Gary Safarik. That is public because he didn't ask for a closed hearing. But there are dozens of confidential informal advisory opinions that have been given out over the year and there is no policy on when those are to be destroyed. There is also no publication system. The State, even with confidential advisory opinions, publishes the opinions, deleting.... They decide which ones they will publish and they just delete the names of who sought the opinion. But it is published so that other people who might have similar questions or issues can say "Look, there is this precedent, there is an advisory opinion that says if I am an employee and I do this kind of work that I should not have similar outside employment." Like the school teacher who is teaching math cannot be paid to tutor her students in the afternoon to help them do better in her class, those kinds of decisions. On the County level we don't have a set of publications so it kind of begs the question if you don't publish them why do you need to keep them forever? Not even the board sees prior opinions because they are sitting in files. It also triggers a question in terms of our offices record keeping in terms of your files. If we had an opinion that was issued in 1970's to a particular councilmember that said don't do this, but there is no record, publicly, of that why hang on to it? The flip side to that is if the stuff is out there maybe some of that stuff should be put in some kind of formal publication so people can see that the board has previously ruled that you cannot do this, as kind of a guide. KS: That would, a universal policy, the Mayor or whoever would have to decide whether or not they wanted to have this reference library verses not. I mean there are pros and cons to both. Having a reference library going back years and years of every advisory opinion is one more thing to take care of. But, that is neither here nor there in terms of the fact that there has to be a policy on it. If it is a universal policy it would answer that. I think the other thing is that either administrative or Corporation Counsel are the people most likely to keep up with what 11