April 19, 2009 05:52 PM UTC

Easy There, Ethics Watch

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission has ruled it is OK for a state lawmaker and her husband to take an 11-day “intercultural” trip to Turkey partially paid for by a nonprofit organization.

Rep. Cherylin Peniston, D-Westminster, requested the ruling on whether the trip would comply with the voter-approved Amendment 41 ethics law. Peniston and several other lawmakers have been invited on the trip by the Multicultural Mosaic Foundation. Peniston would have to pay airfare for her and her husband, but the foundation would pick up the rest of the tab…

“These are legitimate goals in today’s world,” the commission wrote in its opinion, released last week. “The IEC agrees that the state would benefit from the requester’s participation in this trip.”

That reasoning doesn’t sit well with Chantell Taylor, director of the watchdog group Colorado Ethics Watch. Amendment 41 bars lawmakers from accepting gifts over $50 from any organization, but the law allows exceptions for gifts that benefit the entire state.

Taylor said the commission’s definition of what a “gift to the state” constitutes is far too broad…

In the immediate aftermath of the passage of Amendment 41 in 2006, a lot of, well, fairly rash decisions were made–including the decision by then-Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald to resign from a board of state senate presidents. Since that time as Amendment 41 has been “clarified” and implemented, it’s fairly clear she didn’t need to do that (even though she probably would have anyway, primary politics being at least equally factored in that decision)–and we’d say the 41-created ethics commission is spot-on in sorting out “gifts” that clearly do benefit the state (like travel to conferences directly related to the job) from, say, free Rockies skybox tickets.

And with all due respect to Colorado Ethics Watch, Amendment 41 needs to function reasonably, in keeping with the language approved by voters but not in a way that places needless bottlenecks on legislators doing things that are naturally attendant to their jobs. Making Amendment 41 work sanely is important to the reputations of everybody who pushed for its passage in 2006, which if we’re not mistaken includes Colorado Ethics Watch. So lighten up over there–and next time you have somebody on the order of “Teflon” Mike Coffman in the dock, for God’s sake call some more witnesses.