House Passes Amended Ethics Bill

By Susan Haigh Associated Press

HARTFORD – The state House of Representatives passed a reform bill Tuesday that permits state courts to revoke or reduce the government pensions of corrupt state and municipal officials, but not without making a major change.

The bill was revamped to ensure that tens of thousands of state and municipal employees are not subject to the same standard as elected officials.

It passed on a bipartisan 89-60 vote in the Democrat-controlled chamber after hours of heated debate on whether legislators were creating a separate, watered down standard for corrupt government employees. The bill now returns to the Senate for further action, making it unclear whether ethics reform will pass before the legislature adjourns May 7.

“The amendment before us says, ‘Well, maybe we don’t want to be that tough on public employees,’“ said an angry House Minority Leader Lawrence J. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk. “What are we changing? We’re actually making it less strict.”

Gov. M. Jodi Rell also criticized the change and said the new version undermines the intent of the bill.

“The amendment passed by the House today effectively holds one class of public employees to a different ethical standard,” Rell said. “It allows union employees to be subject to less severe penalties than elected or appointed officials an indefensible and inexplicable double standard that no other state has adopted.”

Rep. Diana Urban said the amended bill ensures the collective bargaining process for unionized state and municipal employees is honored by the state because contracts won’t be broken. Also, she said it makes it clear that elected officials should be held to a higher standard than government employees.

“I have always believed that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard because we take an oath of office,” said Urban, D-North Stonington.

Urban also discounted claims that a corrupt state employee, under this amended bill, could automatically walk away with his or her pension intact. She said the costs of restitution, fines and incarceration, determined by the courts, could ultimately cover the value of an entire pension.

Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, accused the House Democrats of wanting to appease state employee unions and ultimately kill ethics reform.

Proponents have said they hope the ethics reform legislation will help regain the public’s trust in government after a series of high-profile public corruption cases across Connecticut that included the fall of former Gov. John G. Rowland. They also were hopeful new ethics reforms would deter politicians from breaking the law.

The idea of revoking or reducing pensions has been debated for years. A big question has been whether to make the legislation retroactive, affecting Rowland and others who’ve been convicted on corruption-related charges.

Rep. Christopher Caruso, co-chairman of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, said he’s not giving up on the idea of retroactivity.

Caruso, D-Bridgeport, plans to offer an amendment later in the session and urged his House colleagues to back him in his quest.

Rep. Jack Malone said he thinks the genesis of Tuesday’s ethics bill stems from the idea of revoking the pensions of Rowland and others – an act he described as “vengeance.”