New draft of Kane County ethics ordinance shows much to debate
With little to no time to actually read nearly 100 pages of revisions to Kane County's ethic's ordinance, the county board's human services committee on Monday did little except review the table of contents and agree there was much work to be done.
Committee Chairman Mark Davoust of St. Charles spent much of the meeting trying to convince committee members they didn't need to ready every page of the proposed changes to at least begin discussion about them. Those arguments fell mostly on deaf ears as the committee only felt confident enough in its level of understanding to approve one short section of the proposed changes.
That section is the severability clause common in many legal documents that says if any part of the new law is deemed illegal, the rest of the law remains valid.
The remainder of the proposed changes will get tackled at a later date. However, if nothing else, board members said it was apparent now that the county's current ethics ordinance simply doesn't address all the areas it should. Sections of the current ethics law were written in black ink in the new draft. Proposed changes were written in a rainbow of colors.
"The last 60 pages contain almost no black," county board member Drew Frasz observed. "I'd say well over 60 percent of (the proposed new ethics law) contains no black ink. I think that demonstrates our current ethics ordinance could be described as ethics light."
Davoust said the whole reason there is even debate about changing the ethics ordinance is because the county board already recognizes the ethics law must be improved. That realization follows a relative dearth of ethics complaints in 2009. The county's ethics adviser, Gene Nottolini, submitted a report to the county on April 13 that shows there were only four inquiries and one quasi-complaint in 2009 concerning interpretation of the county's ethics ordinance and state ethics laws. No complaints were deemed sufficient to even allege a violation of the ordinance.