In a letter Friday to Gov. John Kitzhaber, state Treasurer Ted Wheeler said employees who follow their agency policy — as Wheeler maintains that the officers did — should be shielded from future preliminary reviews and investigations under Oregon's government-ethics law.
"Under the current framework, any state employee who diligently follows his or her agency's rules could be in the professionally perilous position of having to face the Ethics Commission — and to incur significant legal costs," Wheeler wrote.
"For our bottom line, is it a smart use of public funds? A common-sense solution to this problem is to protect public funds, by providing a presumptive safe harbor to those public employees who demonstrate that they follow approved agency policy. I am convinced that this would save significant taxpayer dollars."
Oh..kay. Is there something we're missing?
Aside from the money? Legal costs have topped $100,000 so far for eight state Treasury investment officers facing state ethics reviews, according to a letter released Friday after a public-records request from the Statesman Journal and others.
The way I see it is that the state is spending some chump change, having hired members of the Neil Goldschmidt cabal to "defend" a few staff against ethics charges. A hundred grand may seem like a lot of cash to you or me, but a state agency can pee that much away just on a "diversity" consultant.
Ted claims that he never said that anyone should be above ethics laws, in fact, I've said the opposite, and I have proposed a process to ensure that employees are, in fact, following ethics laws when they follow agency policy.
More to the point, he says that 1) agency policies should be ensured to be consistent with ethics law and there should be a process to ensure that this is the case, and 2) employees who can demonstrate that they followed those policies should then be presumed to be following ethics laws without concern about being subject to a costly and lengthy ethics investigation.
But just how do they "demonstrate that they followed those policies"? Doesn't that involve a "costly and lengthy ethics investigation"?
Ted's "solution" seems to leave more questions than answers, and it's not what I expected to see from him.
