Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005 | 11:03 a.m.
The state Ethics Commission will not back substantive changes to ethics laws in the current legislative session, according to the commission's discussion at Wednesday's meeting.
Board members didn't agree on one commissioner's proposal to strengthen Nevada's ethics statutes by removing the word "willful."
The commission will request legislative approval of a bill clarifying or amending some ethics provisions, but those changes, which include adopting a statute of limitations and changing a filing deadline, are largely technical.
Las Vegas Commissioner William Flangas, the senior member with five years on the board, proposed the language change last month. At Wednesday's meeting he repeated his contention that ethics laws must be bolstered to restore people's faith in them.
"The abuse of the public trust has reached its limit," he said.
Flangas and other critics call the "willful" element of the law a loophole. Officials accused of wrongdoing can use it to argue that while they may have violated ethics statutes, they didn't mean to.
Flangas did not point to specific cases, but "willful" was in the spotlight most recently last year, when Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman was found guilty of an ethics violation for using his position to help his son's business. Because the commission couldn't agree on whether or not the violation was willful, Goodman was not fined.
But Commissioner George Keele, of Minden, said he was concerned that removing the controversial term would pave the way for frivolous complaints and leave the law too vague to pass judicial muster.
"The minute we approve the removal of the willfulness concept we will have more complaints against more public officials than we have ever had since the beginning of civilization," Keele said.
Without the distinction of whether or not an official meant to violate the law, Keele said, "it's going to be anybody's guess" what constitutes an appearance of impropriety, which the law forbids, or a nominal amount of money, for which the law makes an exception.
Well-meaning officials could too easily be charged with violations, Keele said. "You take away the willfulness and, bam, all of a sudden they're in the goo," he said.
Commission Chairman Rick Hsu, of Reno, agreed, positing scenarios wherein he said those with good intentions could be snared, such as a county worker who purchased a discount airline ticket online using a work computer.
"The willful standard helps us to focus on the more serious cases that come before us," Hsu said.
Reno commissioner James Kosinski didn't express an opinion on the "willful" issue except to say that the discussion was pointless.
"It wouldn't have a chance in the world of getting past the Legislature," he said.
But the Legislature this session faces several ethics proposals and widespread public pressure to act on the issue, according to legislators.
Of at least eight ethics-related bills, including the commission's technical one, two propose removing "willful" -- one from Clark County, based on a recommendation by its Ethics Task Force, and one from Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas.
Other ethics bills are being proposed by Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, D-Henderson; Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas; Sen. Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas; the Assembly's ethics committee; and the Attorney General.
Craig Walton, an emeritus professor of ethics at UNLV, said he thought "willful" must go and decried the commissioners' objections as "doublespeak."
If the term were deleted, the commission would still have discretion to decide if cases were frivolous, he said.
"There have been seven or eight cases in the last 10 years where very big scandals occurred and there was no doubt the people did it -- in some cases they didn't even claim they didn't do it -- but they got off because of the 'willful' loophole," he said.
The problem, he said, is that members of the commission "see themselves not as the people's voice, but as elected officials' protector."
Also at Wednesday's ethics meeting:
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