From:                                                              
Susan Kniep,  President
The Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations, Inc.
Website:  ctact.org
860-524-6501
July 7, 2004

 

Bridgeport, Waterbury, and State of Connecticut taxpayers have been placed at risk by corrupt elected and appointed officials.  State and local ethics laws must be strengthened by our State leaders.   Violating our Ethics Laws should be a felony.  The Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations, Inc. (FCTO) recently,   asked Governor Rell to publicly request the  General Assembly go into special session to adopt the Ethics Laws they recently rejected.   FCTO also proposed the adoption of several new Ethics Laws.  

 

FCTO believes that the only true commitment our State elected officials can make to the people they serve is to reverse the Culture of Corruption which has permeated our state through the adoption of these Ethics Laws.  Therefore, we will post on our website the name of all state and local officials who do not support the passage of strong local and state Ethics Laws.  We do so, as we do not believe these individuals should be returned to office.  We ask each and every citizen of Connecticut to contact their State elected representative, and encourage them to pass these very important and necessary laws.   If your representative is not receptive to your request, we ask that you notify us at fctopresident@ctact.org.

 

Today, the following article which appeared in the Hartford Courant offers some insight into our Letter which is posted on our website at ctact.org.

 

 

 

 Failures Don't Weaken Ethics Resolve

 

Many, Weary Of Issue, Want End To Problems

By Joann Klimkiewicz,  Courant Staff Writer

 

 

July 4, 2004

 

Ethics.    It's been on the lips of almost every Connecticut politician and talking head for the last year - the buzzword sparked on the state level that quickly trickled down to local politics.

And if ethics were a pop culture trend, some say it would be nearing its denouement - as stale as reality television and as played out as the low-carb diet craze.

The public, it seems, is reaching ethics overload.

Giordano. Ganim. Silvester. Ellef. And Rowland. The string of names synonymous with ethical lapses has been in the news for several years. And while the issues have been serious and the discourse necessary, some say they're waiting for the day when they won't pick up their newspaper or turn on the morning radio show to hear about it.

Others grow skeptical with every utterance of the word, and say they see politicians and gadflies seizing on the issue for their own gain, invoking former Gov. John G. Rowland's name as they wag fingers at supposed ethical breaches or propose sweeping ethics reforms to bolster their own reputations.

"I'm just a little bit leery," said Anna Cassone, a New Britain resident and co-founder of a citizens group that monitors city government. "I don't want it to become a political word that we just throw around because right now it's the hot new topic. When we talk about ethics, we [shouldn't] put a D or an R in front of it. It's a powerful word and I want it to stand for something."

The ethics chatter has reached a boiling point in New Britain, a politically charged city, and one of the larger ones outside of the state capital.

The city's ethics commission has had more business in the last five months than in the last few years, observers say, taking up three complaints against elected officials and dismissing several more deemed without merit.

In fact, on Thursday, when M. Jodi Rell became the state's 87th governor, pledging to restore faith in government, New Britain's ethics commission was deliberating on a conflict of interest complaint against the city's mayor.

Whether the flurry of ethics activity in New Britain can be linked to talk at the state level or simply with the city's longtime identity as "the Beirut of politics" is up for debate.

Either way, folks like Cassone hope that government officials on all levels clean house, set firm standards and move forward.

"I agree that a lot of people are disappointed to read some of this stuff. Anytime you have a high-ranking official in battle with major ethical indiscretions, people get turned off of politics. And that's the unfortunate thing," said Jason Jakubowski, New Britain's city treasurer and a former alderman.

"But if someone is suggesting we stop talking about ethics, I completely disagree. People deserve to know their elected officials are behaving properly," said Jakubowski, former president of the Connecticut chapter of the American Society of Public Administrators.

In New Britain, the ethics commission found against two city aldermen, saying their actions gave the appearance of impropriety - what some observers say is a vague charge that holds no muster.

The commission ruled that Alderman Fran Ziccardi, who is also president of a local AFSCME labor union, should have recused himself from voting on the council on a sister union contract. And Alderman Rick Lopes was found to have inappropriately registered several of his commercial vehicles in the town where he runs his business rather than New Britain, which has a higher tax rate. Lopes said he erred and reimbursed the city.

A complaint against Mayor Timothy Stewart, in his first term and on leave as a city fire inspector, questioned whether the mayor could be in violation of the ethics code if he negotiates any fire department matters. It asked that he seek an advisory opinion from the commission on how to proceed.

The commission voted unanimously to dismiss the complaint, saying Stewart had taken sufficient steps to distance himself from department matters. For example, he appointed a panel to interview candidates for the city's fire chief and had the city's personnel director negotiate a contract with the fire union.

Supporters of the three officials maintain the complaints are politically motivated and are an example of ethics scrutiny gone awry.

"Ethics has certainly been used as a political ploy to gain favor with the public or to demean certain people for the wrong reasons," Stewart said the day after the commission cleared him of any wrongdoing. "There's such a heightened awareness of ethics today that people are quick to throw stones. This shouldn't be used as an ax to try to chop someone down who's trying to do some good. But that's the nature of the political beast in New Britain."

But if the complaints are driven by dirty politics, Janis Jerman, chairwoman of the city's ethics commission, said it stops at her panel.

"For me, it's not about politics. It's about doing the right thing," Jerman said. "And if someone thinks it is, they're sadly mistaken."

The Rev. Anthony Kopka, chairman of Stratford's ethics commission, agrees that politics has no place on his panel.

"Our goal is to serve the town as best as we can and to keep integrity in government," said Kopka, whose commission is dissecting the town's ethics code and seeing how it can be strengthened.

Where other towns and cities like New Britain may just now be feeling the ethics burn, Kopka said Stratford felt the heat several years ago in the midst of former Mayor Joseph Ganim's corruption scandal in neighboring Bridgeport.

"Ethics was the buzzword," Kopka remembers. "We just got a lot of attention, with people worrying about this official or that official, saying, `We've got to be careful. Look what happened to our next door neighbor.'"

Still, he says, "skepticism is good. How else are we going to be sure what the standards are we should follow? We need to establish those standards to be fair to both the public and those who are serving in government."

In New Britain, Jakubowski recently proposed an overhaul of the city's ethics code. Critics called it an attempt by Jakubowski, who aspires to be mayor, to garner attention as a do-right politician. But he argues ethics can never be talked about too much.

"I don't think anybody will argue that everybody wants to be on the right side of ethics and nobody wants to be on the wrong side," he said. "A major ethical lapse can end a politician's career and there's no doubt about it. But what ... I've done is not unusual. Most ethical laws we have in this country were a result of something negative that happened and then you create a law to fix it."

That's certainly evident on the state level, where a host of ethics rules have been toughened as a result of Rowland's troubles. Penalties were increased for ethics code violations, with the worst offenses becoming class D felonies punishable by up to five years in prison. The statue of limitations for investigating suspected violations was extended to five years.

And in her first day in office, Rell's first executive order imposed strict ethics restraints on government employees. She also created a new position of ethics czar, whose job will be to advise and train elected officials and employees on ethics laws.

Taxpayers are taking notice, too. The Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations has proposed a list of ethics changes to Rell, including extending ethics restrictions to government contractors such as architects, engineers and attorneys.

That gives hope to people like Cassone that there might be a positive end to all the ethics buzz.

"People are sick of it and want it to go away, but we have to finish it and put something into place to prevent it from happening again," she said. "Then maybe the country can look at Connecticut not as a place of corruption, but maybe as a model for how we handled it and what [ethics laws] we put into place."