Prince William County Supervisor Pete Candland has proposed a resolution to strengthen laws preventing conflict of interest. Should his resolution pass, not only will county supervisors be prevented from voting on activities where direct financial gain is a possibility, his resolution takes the spirit of the law further, to prevent other types of gain.
According to Jeremy Borden in the Washington Post:
Supervisor Peter K. Candland (R-Gainesville) offered a resolution last week to tackle that. His measure would force supervisors to disclose involvement in organizations that receive county funds and recuse themselves from voting on issues in which they or their relatives, including spouses, are involved in.
“Supervisors may still serve on boards of charities and have a positive impact on their community, but they must recuse themselves from voting when there is a direct conflict of interest,” Candland said in an e-mail response to questions.
Supervisor Peter K. Candland (R-Gainesville) offered a resolution last week to tackle that. His measure would force supervisors to disclose involvement in organizations that receive county funds and recuse themselves from voting on issues in which they or their relatives, including spouses, are involved in.
“Supervisors may still serve on boards of charities and have a positive impact on their community, but they must recuse themselves from voting when there is a direct conflict of interest,” Candland said in an e-mail response to questions.
Hopefully, this adjustment wouldn’t allow supervisors to pop on and off boards just to satisfy the letter of the law. Many people have grumbled and groused about discretionary spending over the years. Discretionary funds were allocated to each supervisor to cover operating cost. Those funds that were left over could be distributed to various organizations throughout the county in the form of charitable donations. Often little league teams and schools benefitted. Usually the amounts were under $1000 but not always.
The grumbling turned to outrage and rebellion last year when supervisor Wally Covington of Brentsville Magisterial District attempted to slide $100,000 to Rainbow Therapeutic Riding, a non profit organization where his wife sat on the board of directors. Because the “gifts” must be approved by the BOCS, the item appeared on the agenda right before last Thanksgiving. Agenda watchers sounded the alarm, the blogs got involved, and there was one hell of a hue and cry rising up in the blogosphere. Covington pulled his request but citizen outrage was already unleashed and would not willingly be put back in its cage.
Chairman Corey Stewart apparently feels this resolution will prevent spouses and other family members from participating in county non-profit and charity organizations. The WaPo story quotes Stewart:
“You can see the Pandora’s box we’re opening with this,” Stewart said. “Not only are you discouraging board members . . . from participating in not-for-profits but you might have the boards of these charities avoiding putting family on there, and that would be unfortunate.”
Perhaps Stewart doesn’t see the advantage of having everyone play by the rules. It seems to me that Supervisors or their families can sit on whatever boards they chose. They just won’t be able to slide money to the organization. That seems more than fair and transparent. While this new resolution won’t prevent conflict of interest from occurring, it provides a framework that lists the terms of engagement a little more clearly. No longer will a supervisor be able to declare that he or she doesn’t think their actions are a conflict of interest because the supervisor’s relative doesn’t receive a dime from the organization. There are gains other than financial, as we all know.
Now if we can just extend this resolution a little to include campaign funds. That is where the real abuse and conflict of interest is in this county. Stay tuned…..
It’s a start, but the tax dollars funneled to non-profits pale in comparison to the costs imposed on the rest of us by developers – the Board’s biggest contributors. Let’s see a little recusal there. Bwahahah. Hell will probably freeze over first.
I would love to see one long list of every non profit that gets a chunk along with the size of the chunk. I certainly don’t want to pull money from essential charities. I suppose I am saying I am curious.
The 2013 budget has about $2.3 million in donations to community partners as listed in the link below:
http://www.pwcgov.org/government/dept/budget/Documents/13BUD–03–Budget%20Summary–11–Community%20Partners.pdf
@Watching
Those are all the non profits who are served through the budget? I wish I had the sense to be able to have all of that makes sense at a glance.
The non-profits are the 2nd and 3rd page, pages 36 & 37. The first column is the outfit getting the money. They are listed under “Aging” or another county department because every community partner has a sponsering agency. So for example, the Department of Aging sponsers the flow through to Project Mend A House. Project Mend a House got $25,148 in 2012 budget and in the 2013 budget gets $25,903. Really it’s just a list on these two pages that have all the non-profits. The Red Cross, ACTS, SERVE, they are all listed separately. I tried to copy and paste them but I lost the formatting and it was a big mess. They total $2.3 million per year.
It is interesting to note that several non-profits are listed for funding under several different headings/agencies.
Watchful, I just don’t have the sense to figure it all out. Maybe the funding falls under two different categories?
Could be, I can’t be sure. I like to see a budget where all costs going to a project are listed together.
Moon, you are correct for some of the Partners having funding that falls into two categories. Let me use Project Mend-A-House (PMAH) as the best example (well, the best since I know about the contributions).
The first bag of money listed under the Area Agency on Aging are the funds the Agency receiveds under the Federal Older Americans Act Title VI (Activites for Health, Independence & Longevity). These funds can be used to provide adaptive items in the older adults home (think grab bars in bathrooms as example) or to do minor repairs to keep the home livable.
The second bag of money listed is under Public Works’ Neighborhood Services department. PMAH, along with Habitat for Humanity, are both funded here as a way to help the low-income, elderly and disabled to have minor work done also to keeo the home livable. In the last couple of years, both organizations have also been using the Public Works funding to assist people identified for Hoarding….working with the folks on the County Hoarding Task Force.
Its actually an interesting list when you sort through what each of the entities are doing within the departments. Like the donation to Volunteer Prince William under Criminal Justice Services – when someone is placed on probation with a community services requirement, they are sent to VPW to be placed in the community.