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."