Local leaders must renew emphasis on ethics

Public officials in Beaufort County need to tighten up their understanding and appreciation for ethics standards.

It’s not good enough to say you don’t know the standards. That knowledge needs to be a top priority.

And leaders need to use common sense. Not everything that fails the smell test is spelled out in law, and it shouldn’t have to be.

But look how business gets done with the public bodies leading the towns of Hilton Head Island and Bluffton.

On Hilton Head, a Town Council agenda comes out one day and it includes a bombshell. The council would take a vote on annexing Bay Point Island across Port Royal Sound in rural, unincorporated Beaufort County. It would be done to accommodate a five-star resort. That’s the first the public — including Beaufort County leaders — had heard about this matter of great concern and controversy.

But Town Council members already knew so much it seemed like a done deal. They had been meeting with the developer in small, secret meetings — deliberately kept small to avoid a quorum and thereby avoid the mandates of the Freedom of Information Act. As a result, as the public first hears about the proposal, Mayor David Bennett is saying it would be great for the town. Council as a whole moves it forward, even as stunned members of the public express dismay. And the person representing the developer in setting up some of the meetings and pushing the hotel development has also worked for the campaigns of Bennett and Town Council member David Ames.

This does not pass the smell test. It is the wrong way to conduct public business and set public policy.

In Bluffton, Mayor Lisa Sulka was recently cleared of three allegations that she broke state ethics law. The allegations centered on land purchases by the town and whether associates of Sulka, a real estate agent, stood to benefit by her votes. The state Ethics Commission investigated and ruled Sulka did nothing wrong.

The commission accepted the mayor’s retroactive recusal from a vote she took three years earlier on a land purchase. A retroactive recusal is an odd notion. It is rare, and it is legal, but it defies common sense.

And from our study of the minutes documenting that recusal, and the resolution that constituted the recusal, there was no obvious, understandable public statement or public discussion of what was taking place, for whom, and why.

Attorneys paid to advise the councils need to step in and wave more red flags, steering them away from anything that could possibly be seen as a violation of ethics or open-meetings standards.

Loally, the bar must be raised higher still. Governance should not be a matter of what you can get away with, or who you know, or gotcha campaigns of accusations and innuendo. Governance needs to be totally transparent, with everyone paying attention, knowing the rules, and using common sense to err on the side of full disclosure.

This story was originally published January 22, 2017 at 2:08 AM with the headline "Local leaders must renew emphasis on ethics."