CPP: The State Ethics Commission’s strengths and weaknesses

The Carolina Public Press analyses the State Ethics Commission’s strengths and weaknesses. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The state office charged with the huge task of keeping North Carolina’s public officials on the up-and-up meets in a surprisingly small space. At least four times a year, the State Ethics Commission convenes in what was once the dining room of a Victorian-era home in downtown Raleigh. …

Every time the General Assembly has a session, it adjusts parts of ethics and lobbying laws, and most of the changes lead to an increase in the commission’s workload.

“They are constantly giving us more to do,” said Newson, the commission’s executive director. “They are expanding our jurisdiction. And, in fairness, they have given us more resources at various points.”

Most recently, the legislature added new categories of individuals who must file SEI forms each year: Technical Advisory Committee members of Metropolitan Planning Organizations and Rural Planning Organizations.

That means that the commission suddenly has hundreds more forms to evaluate. To handle the influx of paperwork, the General Assembly budgeted for an additional full-time staff worker.

“If you find a state agency that will say, ‘We have all the resources we need,’ let me know, because that’s a rare entity,” Newson said.

“But the bottom line is, yeah, we’ve had to make do. We’ve had to spread various work around the staff, divide it within areas that were not their area of speciality, necessarily, just to get things done. We were really hopelessly behind for the first three or four years. There was no way humanly possible, with the resources we were given, that we could do the job that was assigned to us. But it’s gotten better, I will say that. It’s not 100 percent, but it’s way better than it was when we first started out.”