When the state ethics commissioners gathered earlier this month to fire their executive secretary they didn’t gather at all.
Instead, staff attorneys set up a speakerphone, which the media dutifully encircled with microphones and waited for the appointed board members to dial in remotely.
The farcical scene was too apt. For more than a year, the board of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission has seemed lost and disconnected, saying little and doing less while staff members fought and filed lawsuits.
All the while, work piled up and public confidence waned in the lone state office specifically charged with regulating the thorny issues of campaign finance and lobbying.
“The ethics commission has become a legal morass and a political football,” said Heath Garrett, a panel member since 2011.
At least some of the commission's problems, however, are traceable to the commissioners themselves. The board made poor hiring decisions, leading to much of the internal strife that has paralyzed the agency for nearly two years.
They have spent much of their time fighting lawsuits from current and former employees, meeting often in private sessions with their attorneys.
Publicly, the commissioners have also made few demands for accountability.
Chairwoman Hillary Stringfellow said commissioners were unaware of the extent of the commission’s backlog of unresolved complaints, reported separately by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, because the agency lacked controls “to independently monitor the case load.”
Members said they couldn't fully remake the staff because of the legal charges and counter charges, and they didn't trust the work it was doing. The panel didn't take up any of the more than 150 pending cases before it, and only now is considering rules governing lobbying after the General Assembly passed major ethics law changes during the 2013 session.
The inaction has come with enormous public cost. The commission’s reputation has been seriously compromised, and the political soap opera that it has become shows no signs going dark. Former executive secretary Holly LaBerge, fired earlier this month, appears to be laying the ground work for a lawsuit against the state. If she sued, she would become the fifth commission employee to sue or seek a settlement.
Members like Garrett are now agitating for what some lawmakers have already been calling for: a complete makeover of the commission.
“I feel like we’ve got to start over on the commission,” said Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, an ethics reform advocate in the General Assembly. “I don’t think we need just some tweaking around the edges. We need to take it down to the studs and start over.”
Staff turnover
The commission is made up of five members appointed by the governor, a committee of Senate leaders and speaker of the Georgia House.
All five current members are lawyers, including at least three who have or now serve on the highly political Judicial Nominating Commission, which recommends to the governor who he should appoint to judgeships.
The two Republican commission members Deal appointed, Garrett and Dennis Cathey, and their firms, have been major donors to Republican causes over the years. One of Garrett’s firms gave more than $100,000 to candidates and political groups between 2008 and 2011, including $15,250 to Gov. Nathan Deal’s campaign. A Garrett business does campaign work for Attorney General Sam Olens.
Garrett, who has been a registered lobbyist at the Capitol, said it’s important that the commission have at least one member who is regulated by the panel so it gets a “hands on” perspective.
Among the commission’s most important jobs is hiring people to run the agency, and that hasn’t always turned out well.
LaBerge was hired in August 2011. Rather than any of the attorney candidates, or those with a background in ethics enforcement, the board instead chose LaBerge, a non-lawyer, on the recommendation from Deal’s staff. At the time, the agency was investigating ethics complaints against Deal’s campaign. Of the current members of the commission, only Stringfellow was on the panel at the time she was hired.
LaBerge was fired earlier this month, after a Fulton County judge fined her $10,000 and said she had been "dishonest and non-transparent" in a whistleblower lawsuit brought by her predecessor.
LaBerge was at least the second commission employee fired this year. Former staff attorney Elisabeth Murray-Obertein was fired in January after police reported that she smelled like alcohol after falling at work.
Murray-Obertein, hired by LaBerge in December 2011, became a key witness in lawsuits brought by former executive secretary Stacey Kalberman, her former deputy director and a third former commission employee, all of whom claimed they were fired or forced from office. Murray-Obertein also threatened to file her own lawsuit. The four cases have cost Georgia taxpayers nearly $3 million.
Stringfellow said the office’s “recent personnel issues” have forced the part-time, unpaid commissioners to become “involved at a much more in-depth level.” For example, this spring the commission relieved LaBerge of the power to hire and fire employees. A subcommittee of Garrett and Commissioner Lawton Jordan were behind the recent hiring of two new staff attorneys.
But other attempts by the commissioners to clean up the mess have been disastrous.
In late 2013, they hired Robert Constantine, a one-time lobbyist and former administrative law judge with the worker's compensation system, to help oversee the agency and restore its credibility. A few weeks after the commission hired him, the AJC reported that personnel records said Constantine had recently been fired from his workers's compensation job for "failure to meet performance expectations." A month later the commission decided to end its contract with him, although it continued paying him for a few more months.
“I think the commission’s failures have been in hiring people not up to the job of being executive director,” said Robert Highsmith, a lobbyist and former commission member who now represents politicians before the panel.
Rick Thompson, a former commission executive secretary, said board hiring decisions have been a major reason for the agency’s problems in recent years.
“They have full responsibility for what is happening or not happening at the commission,” Thompson said. “If nothing is happening, that’s on the commission as much as the executive secretary.”
Name change undermined confidence
Some board members have said they felt hamstrung by bills lawmakers approved at the end of the 2009 and 2010 sessions that took away the authority of the panel to write rules on the behavior of politicians and lobbyists, increased the filings of candidates and lobbyists that the commission would have to handle, and increased penalties when filings came in late.
That happened at a time when state agencies were having to slash budgets, so the commission’s responsibilities increased when its resources had been cut. That combination made the commission “impotent,” Garrett said.
“It diverted the time and resources away from the investigation side,” he said.
The 2010 law also changed the name of the panel from the State Ethics Commission to the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission.
“Taking ethics out of the commission’s name was not a good move,” Garrett said. “It contributed to an undermining of public confidence.”
Some of the laws' changes have since been rescinded, but the commission's financial situation was used by the board in 2011 as a reason to slash the pay of the executive secretary and eliminate her assistant's job. That led Kalberman to quit, although she and her assistant argued in their lawsuits that they were forced out because they vigorously pursued the ethics charges against the governor's campaign. Kalberman's case went to court, and a jury agreed with her.
Garrett said major changes should be made. He suggested the panel have more members, including maybe a few appointed by the judiciary. More money is needed to beef up the panel’s investigations into political wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, he said, the backlog of cases dating back seven years are slowly being cleared. The commission is scheduled to hold a regular meeting on Tuesday, where it will discuss pending cases. It’s unknown how many members will show up in person, or simply dial in.
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