2012-09-12 Board of Ethics minutes

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And I applaud your ability to maintain your appearance of stability and equality. That I want to say. Now, the other one, and time’s up—whoo, please here, tell me what the other one was. I got my notes here— MR. DILL: All right, for the record, you will be moving on to the Petition 2012-03. MS. HAMPTON: Yeah, that’s the one about the county employees. Now here we talk about blurred vision. This is where your job is going to be to draw the line. And what’s beautiful about this is we’ve got the press here. And it’s your job today to impress the press on what the ethics commission is about, what your job is, because you call the shots on how our public officials conduct themselves. And my last thing I want to say, as I sum it all up, because I think you get the gist of what this citizen believes your job is—this isn’t to confer criminality charges or to start telling people they’re bad. Yours is to take it. And I remember something that Lincoln Ashida said to me, who I believe gave me, as legislative aide, the gas and the how you say, meter, to know when to not do something. He said, “R.J., use the refrigerator”—I think he said ice box. He said when you go to clean out your ice box, and you have stuff laying around in there for years like friends, other things—businesses, contracts, things like that, associates--what you need to do is sniff every last one of them. If it smells funny, don’t keep it. If it smells funny, throw it out. He says use this. If you have to come to me and ask me whether you should do something—which is what they all should have done, every last one of these people that is here today, ______ the ethics. Don’t do it. For two years I carried that thought. You never saw me, and I think you saw less of my boss, because we got it. And that’s what I want you today to convey to the community, what it means to end up here in this seat justifying your behavior and conduct. And please do not allow these people who come up here that you interrogate or you question, to beg the question or use emotion as their reason and rationality for what it is that they did or did not do. Thank you. Mr. Dill called up Kerri Marks, who had signed up to testify regarding agenda item 4a, the August 31, 2012, letter to the Board from Scott Nago. MS. MARKS: Aloha, good morning. I’d also like to testify on the Petition 2012-03 first, and I’ll be brief on all of them. Asking county employees to attend any sort of campaign event is absolutely unethical and wrong. That’s all I have to say about that. You shouldn’t have to think about that too hard at all. That was terrible. We should smack them for that. As far as the letter goes, about Dominic helping move some boxes around the office, that’s not an ethical problem. That’s a guy trying to help move some boxes around. So that shouldn’t take you very long to figure out, either. And on the Petition 2012-01, about Ikeda and Onishi—it’s still wrong to not do your job. I testified about that before. I was on the mainland for your second go-around across the hall there, so I missed that one. But I’m here again to tell you that that is still a valid petition. It’s still unethical. You need to show up and do the job you’re elected to do. That’s it. Mahalo. There was no further public testimony. 3. APPROVAL OF THE REGULAR SESSION MINUTES OF AUGUST 8, 2012