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Red knuckles
at Legislature

Ethics is becoming a growth industry for state legislatures. The National Conference on State Legislatures reports that 4 out of 5 states have ethics training for new legislators and, since 1991, one-quarter of the states (including Hawaii) require ethics training.

Twenty-seven states (but not Hawaii) forbid legislators from asking for or getting campaign money during legislative sessions. And 23 states restrict or forbid honorariums offered in conjunction with their official business.

On paper Hawaii is well-stocked with ethics laws. This is the basic law:

"No legislator or employee shall solicit, accept, or receive, directly or indirectly, any gift, whether in the form of money, service, loan, travel, entertainment, hospitality, thing, or promise, or in any other form, under circumstances in which it can reasonably be inferred that the gift is intended to influence the legislator or employee in the performance of the legislator's or employee's official duties or is intended as a reward for any official action on the legislator's or employee's part."

Figuring out what "official duties" or "reasonably inferred" means is the job of the state Ethics Commission. So with the interest, the laws and the bureaucracy in place, why are questions of ethics raging at the Legislature?

The 2005 legislative session opened with eyebrows raised about trips that Maui Democratic Sen. Kalani English took for free on Hawaii Air Ambulance at about the same time he was helping the company in his district. The kicker to the story was that while English was tooling around for free, he had taken Senate reimbursement for the trips.

Citizen groups have appealed -- unsuccessfully -- for English to be officially sanctioned.

Senate Republicans have called for an Ethics Commission investigation into Ewa Beach Democrat Sen. Brian Kanno, who introduced legislation to financially damage a company that refused to rehire someone who also worked at the Legislature.

And now Kaneohe Democrat Sen. Clayton Hee is defending himself after a staff member was found sending fund-raising tickets to people who had business before his committee. The staff member, a University of Hawaii professor, resigned her position with Hee on Friday.

Added to those ethics question marks is the practice of holding fund-raisers during the legislative session. A coalition of eight government reform groups is calling for lawmakers to promise not to collect money during the four-month session. Want to bet that a lot more legislators are holding fund-raisers this month than are taking the pledge against them?

If the lawmakers wanted to put ethics on their "must do" list, they would also consider creating permanent, equally balanced legislative committees to handle ethics questions, then the public would have somewhere to go for action and answers.