Ethics Commission on trial

J. Craig Anderson

Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.

For Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald, last week's ethics hearing was nothing less than a trial for her political life. As the case unfolded, however, the Ethics Commission also found its own conduct under scrutiny.

The commission voted 5-1 to dismiss the complaint against Boggs McDonald. But that vote came only after the one witness who might have corroborated the allegations against her denied that he had made the statements attributed to him by the commission's investigator.

That investigator, the executive director of the commission, could not prove otherwise. Instead of recording her interview with Assemblyman Morse Arberry, D-Las Vegas, or arranging to have a third party present, Executive Director Stacy Jennings said she had only taken notes of the telephone conversation.

"It's naive, it's unsophisticated and it's going to render these kinds of things a waste," Juli Star-Alexander, executive director of Redress Inc., said of such practices. "They really should be more modeled after the court system, but they still don't have the authority of the court system."

Redress is a nonprofit organization that helps people who believe they have been treated unfairly by the legal system. Star-Alexander said evidentiary gaffes and conflicts of interest have rendered the Ethics Commission largely ineffective.

Following a day of testimony, the commission voted Thursday to dismiss a complaint that Boggs McDonald attempted to use her position as a Las Vegas City Council member in 2003 to defeat a Senate bill she thought would put her husband's job in jeopardy.

The majority of commission members said there was too little credible evidence to support allegations that she personally pressured then-Assemblyman Wendell Williams and Arberry to kill the bill.

Williams, a Democrat, was a Las Vegas city employee in 2003. He said he felt pressured to do Boggs McDonald's bidding in the Assembly because as a councilwoman, she was, in effect, his boss. He testified that Boggs McDonald repeatedly urged him to oppose Senate Bill 446, a measure to restructure the state treasurer's office where her husband worked.

Boggs McDonald responded that Williams made up the story as payback for her unwillingness to defend him against allegations in 2004 of "double-dipping" for extra wages and of racking up hundreds of dollars in personal calls to his city-issued phone.

That standoff made Arberry the pivotal witness. Jennings said that during an April phone interview, the Las Vegas Democrat told her that Boggs McDonald had called him to try to influence his vote on the legislation.

But Jennings didn't take steps to record or otherwise have the conversation witnessed. Instead, she drafted a summary of the conversation and entered it into the public record.

But Arberry testified that he didn't remember making any such accusations. He also said that Boggs McDonald never pressured him to take action against the bill.

Bill Boyarsky, vice president of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, said investigations in his city are conducted in a formal manner, usually with lawyers present.

"It's done in a very procedural way," Boyarsky said.

Jennings told the Las Vegas Sun this week that she could have recorded the initial interview with Arberry's permission, but she didn't think it would be necessary. She said she won't repeat that mistake.

Jennings said she mailed Arberry a copy of her written summary via Federal Express in September, but when assemblyman came to testify this week, he told commissioners he had never seen the summary. He said that he sometimes fails to open his mail for months.

Arberry was under oath. The commission made no attempt to refer the matter to the prosecutors for review.

If commission members believed a witness had given false testimony, they would have to forward the evidence to prosecutors and hope the court system would take care of it, said Craig Walton, president of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics, a government watchdog group.

"Then the attorney general would have to, in effect, try to corroborate one side," Walton said.

Another issue about the commission's procedures arose when a member disclosed that he had known one of the witnesses for years, yet he did not recuse himself from the case.

During the deliberations, commission member George Keele praised state Treasurer Brian Krolicki and Boggs McDonad's husband, Steven McDonald. He said that he had known Krolicki for many years.

"Here are two very good men who are honorable public officers," Keele said. Minutes later, he voted to dismiss the complaint against Boggs McDonald.

Commission members are required to recuse themselves only if a party to the hearing is a business partner, love interest or relative, Jennings said.

Star-Alexander said that isn't the first time the recusal issue has arisen. At an ethics hearing in June for former Clark County Public Administrator Jared Shafer, then-commission member Mark Hutchinson disclosed that he had had business dealings with Shafer, but Hutchinson was not asked to step aside.

The commission cleared Shafer, who was accused of using his public office to obtain a job as administrator of a private estate.

"The whole thing appears to be farcical, based on the fact that they don't have their act together yet," Star-Alexander said.

In defending the commission, Jennings noted that all but three of its last dozen hearings have resulted in findings of wrongdoing.

Boyarski said ethics commissions garner nearly as much criticism as politicians, and their members need to follow strict procedures so that the public has confidence in their findings.

No commission in the country, no matter how well it operates, is going to rid society of political corruption, he added.

"Whatever the Ethics Commission does in Las Vegas isn't going to clean up Las Vegas," Boyarsky said.

J. Craig Anderson can be reached at 259-2320 or at craig@lasvegassun.com.