Columnist Jon Ralston: Some ethics lapses so obvious

Friday, April 23, 2004 | 4:34 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

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April 24 - 25, 2004

Anyone who has followed the celebrated ethics imbroglios during the last decade in Southern Nevada has seen few cases where the wrongdoing was hard to understand.

It was obvious that Clark County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates should not have solicited a business opportunity from Strip casinos she oversees. It was obvious that various commissioners should not have put their friends onto a preferred list to receive airport contracts. And it was obvious that Councilman Michael McDonald should not have used his position to help bail his employer out of a bad business investment.

It did not matter whether the Ethics Commission reprimanded or exonerated or chided -- or even whether any stern punishment was handed down. The public knew that these folks had transgressed. It was so ... obvious.

Similarly, it matters little whether the ethics tribunal ever punishes the father-son act performing on Stewart Avenue for turning the city government into a house of ill repute. Mayor Oscar Goodman may lament that brothels are not legal downtown, but the one he and his stepchild Michael Mack already are operating down on Stewart Avenue seems like a good place to start the red-light district.

No one needs ethics commissioners to rule on promoting your son's business or turning the city's public information office into a taxpayer-funded mayoral ego-gratification operation or selling your marketing skills to those you regulate. It's so obvious.

The mayoral motto, "anything that's legal," is not the same as anything that's ethical. And most people know the difference. And even if they don't -- whether they are elected officials or candidates preparing to file for office -- the law tells them.

Most discussion of ethics laws focuses on the ones that deal with granting "unwarranted preferences" or exposing the intersection between public duties and the official's "commitment in a private capacity to the interests of others."

But that's after the fact. Another, less well known part of the law precedes the parts that describe violations and expressly instructs public officials to take steps to stay out of jeopardy.

In NRS 281.421, you can find the ethics code's legislative declaration and findings section, which is alternately sophomoric and substantive, insipid and insightful. To wit:

The section declares that the "public policy of this state" is that "a public office is a public trust and shall be held for the sole benefit of the people."

Really? One would hope this is one of those truths that anyone would hold to be self-evident. But one might also think that separating your family interests from your public interests and not using your elected perch to pounce on those who need your vote also would be obvious.

The next part of this section of the law, though, is quite illuminating:

"A public officer or employee must commit himself to avoid conflicts between his private interests and those of the general public whom he serves."

Think about what that says, folks. When someone gets into public office, he should diligently try to head off any potential conflicts -- not walk into them willingly or allow those close to them to put them in a compromised position.

That is, those commissioners violated this tenet when they put their cronies on that list for airport contracts in the late '90s. Mack thumbs his nose at the law when he opens a consulting business and solicits clients who might come before him. And Goodman ignores this law when he uses his title and appropriates taxpayer-funded property to help his son make money, willingly allowing himself to be used by a private company, whether it is iPolitix or Jane magazine, and when he doesn't tell his sons or his law partners to stay out of the billboard business, thus creating a conflict and preventing him from doing his job.

Is this not obvious to everyone?

The Las Vegas City Council may have two of the poster boys for unethical behavior. But others have flouted this seminal part of the ethics law, too.

Lynette Boggs McDonald, as a city councilwoman, never should have accepted a position on the Station Casinos board -- that wasn't avoiding a conflict, it was creating one. Unlike others, though, she all but acknowledged her mistake -- if not in words, in her deed of getting off the board to become a county commissioner.

Various legislators and local government officials who become "consultants" when they have no real skills to sell other than their title, are violating that declaration in the law. And even public employees, no matter what the state Supreme Court rules, are creating potential conflicts when they serve in other governments.

I find it darkly humorous when people say that these folks -- candidates and elected officials -- should take ethics seminars, as if that will tell them what is right and wrong, as if there is so much nuance here. The clarity of that part of the ethics law speaks for itself.

And I also chuckle when I hear Goodman and others solemnly or angrily declare that they did not personally profit from their actions. That misses the point, too.

Bribery is a crime. The raison d'etre for the Ethics in Government Law is to prevent people from using their positions to benefit others instead of, as that statement of the obvious tells us, the people.

A conflict is a conflict is a conflict. They are not hard to see.

The solutions, though, are evanescent. Full-time elected officials? Better salaries and better people? Harsher penalties for ethics violations?

As we continue to cycle through these scandals every few years and the quality of our elected officials (and their behavior) does not appreciably improve, the answers, sadly, are not so obvious.