Board needs contractors’ expertise
Your July 24 editorial, "Reject contractor board member's move to bar competition," is mistaken on several points, and would prevent regulatory board members from applying their professional experience as part of the regulatory process. Professional boards are an established part of our regulatory landscape, and they are based on the principle that the professionals themselves can best establish rules and implement policy that reflects the Legislature's judgment. This is why the law already incorporates a more relaxed prohibition against conflict of interest for professional regulatory board members.
The Department of Commerce & Consumer Affairs provides administrative support for 25 professional boards, including the Contractors License Board. These volunteer unpaid board members all receive training in the state ethics code.
By law, the CLB includes 13 members, five of whom must be general engineering or building contractors and five of whom must be specialty contractors. As a result, 10 of the 13 members hold licenses that are potentially affected by every decision the board makes. This breakdown between "industry" and "public" members is common across the state's professional regulatory boards.
Unless there are facts that we are unaware of, the board member here appears to have acted in his capacity as an industry board member by providing advice about a subject that he was uniquely qualified to provide. This is precisely why the Legislature established the industry board member requirement, and if anyone considers this practice improper, the board member should not be blamed for it.
The board member's actions were overseen by the board itself, the board's executive officer and a deputy attorney general. His actions were taken within the context of the ethics law, which says that a person whose board position is required by law to have particular qualifications "shall only be prohibited from taking official action that directly and specifically affects a business or undertaking in which he has a substantial interest." Traditionally, this has meant that a board member should not vote on a licensing matter relating to the member, not that he should refrain from participating in discussions about whether a type of work should require a specific type of license.
The discussion surrounding the board's October 2007 decision to require that contractors must have a synthetic field surface license in order to install synthetic turf appears consistent with the law as applied to all of our boards, which permits and encourages the board member's involvement in such discussions. Although this approach has been longstanding, we appreciate the need for public confidence in the professional regulatory board system; consequently, we are seeking further guidance from the State Ethics Commission.
Finally, although attention is currently focused on the CLB, we should remember the important and often thankless work performed by several hundred citizen volunteer board and commission members across the state. An important part of this service is the open and spirited discussion on the application of the board members' own professional experience, the specific experience for which they were chosen.
Lawrence Reifurth is director of the state Department of Commerce & Consumer Affairs.