2007-06-13 Board of Ethics Minutes Regular Session mc

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That's allowed in the informal advisory opinions. But the way it's being used is incorrect here. It's unclear from these two documents, the resolution and the request for an investigation as to who's asking for this. Mr. Ashida is put on the agenda as the one asking for this. If that's the case, there's a bit of a conflict here, having Mr. Ashida be the attorney for the Board and the attorney for Councilwoman Nae`ole, because that's a conflict. There's just no way to get around it. The Charter says that the Corporation Counsel shall be the chief legal advisor and legal counsel for all officers and employees of the County and all boards and commissions. Now in the past, Mr. Ashida has told us that this has not been a problem because they compartmentalized. But in this case, it turns out, at least for this meeting, he's the attorney for the Board and for Ms. Nae`ole in this case. And so we have to question that, as to whether that's appropriate. But essentially what has happened here is that there is a mixture of these two types of informal advisory opinions, the one asked for by the person about themselves, and the one asked for by someone else. And where this conflict becomes a problem is that if we allow people—officers of the County—to request these informal advisory opinions about other people, then we have a situation where people could go on a witch hunt. Now I know Mr. Ashida and I know his temperament, his personality, his ethics don't allow that kind of thing for him. But if we set a precedent here of allowing this mixture of these two types of requests, then that could be a problem in the future. We don't want to have an informal advisory opinion request coming from an officer of the County unless they have specific information that says I know about this. In this request, we don't have any specific information. All they have is allegations made by someone else. And so this request wouldn't seem to come in under either of those, 286A or 286B. It's neither the person who is asking about —who is involved, asking about this, nor is it someone asking about something that they know about an ethical violation in another situation. This gets to be a problem also in the fact that should the Board consider this and decide that there is no conflict, which I don't see how you can do anything else, because there isn't any information about any specific problem, then that sort of inoculates the councilwoman if some other information should come forward in the future. I don't expect it to, but I'm just saying that down the road this could set a precedent where people would use this kind of thing to inoculate themselves from being charged with an ethical violation in the future, because as the Code of Ethics says, once you've rendered your decision, then that person doesn't have to face those charges. That opinion stands for what the County says has happened. So we have to be careful on that. At any rate, the other thing that I don't approve of here in this, is in the draft of the resolution, limiting the scope and inquiry of the—limiting the nature and scope of the inquiry, because you folks aren't limited by the Code of Ethics. You can investigate as far as you want and as much as you want as far as the Code of Ethics, but you have to—wherever the evidence takes you, you have to follow it. So that I don't think is an appropriate thing to put into a request. It isn't allowed—or it isn't a thing that's allowed in the filing for an informal advisory opinion anyway. I'm sorry, I go on and on here, butI'm sorry. Essentially my point is that this is an improper request and should be rejected by the 3