EDITORIAL: Thank You Chairman Cheit for Your Service, Ethics Needs New Leadership

EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL: Thank You Chairman Cheit for Your Service, Ethics Needs New Leadership

Long-time Ethics Committee member and chair Ross Cheit
The Chairman of the Ethics Commission should be the champion for transparency and accessibility.  However, the present chairman, Ross Cheit, first told GoLocal that the commission did not have the resources to post the financial disclosure forms of 4,400 elected and appointed officials online so they could be readily accessible to the public and the media.

Cheit’s first response was misleading at best.

A follow-up GoLocal Access to Public Records Act request revealed that the Commission had not requested any funding in the past three years.

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GoLocal asked in the request, “Please provide any memos, emails or other communications to the Governor's Office, Department of Administration, House Finance Committee, Speaker of the House, Senate Finance Committee or Senate President in the past three years requesting funding to ‘digitize’ or place online in any structure/format for financial disclosure forms for RI officials.”

Response:  The Ethics Commission has no records responsive to your request.

In follow up questions to the Commission, Cheit responded that it was a waste of time to allow the public or the media to have access online and that the existing system of having to call, email or drive to downtown Providence and park to visit the office during state working hours was sufficient.

In follow up emails, Cheit wrote, “My guess is that very few Rhode Islanders would think we should spend lots of money to create a system just so you can access forms at night, when in fact you can almost always get them in one business day. The RIEC responds so much faster than the law requires and much faster than any agency I have ever heard about.”

Cheit seems unaware that the Rhode Island Board of Election posts all campaign finance reports online and the Secretary of State has an ever-improving lobbyist tracking online database. 

Chiet's claim of one-day turnaround is not true — a recent request by GoLocal took days for the Commission to respond only to admit, after days of searching, that the elected official never filed the form.

Cheit, who has served on the Commission since 2004, has been chair since 2011.

Thankfully, bipartisan leaders have called for these financial disclosures to be put online. Governor Gina Raimondo and Cranston Mayor Allan Fung have both called for the documents to be posted online and fully accessible.

Speaker of the House Nick Mattiello is submitting legislation on Tuesday to require the Ethics Commission to put the documents online.

Cheit continues to balk, saying the agency will need new funding. It is hard to believe that the staff members who now have to manually respond to requests can’t be asked to post the documents online or at worst learn to leverage technology to upload the data.

Uploading 4,400 hundred documents today is simple.  GoLocal has posted tens of thousands of 38 Studios depositions and documents and is puzzled that this has any major cost -- it only requires a significant commitment to allowing the public to public documents.

GoLocal offers no opinion if his judgment is sound relative to dispensing justice on questions of ethics.

But, his resistance to change and the misleading nature of Cheit’s bristling speaks volume about an appointee that has served his time. Now he needs to step aside and allow for new leadership -- a chair that has an understanding that the public and the press do deserve to have access to critical documents online.  It is critical that the chair understand that the documents are not his or hers to control. 

This entire issue will only fuel Rhode Islanders' cynicism -- it seems impossible that the Ethics Commission's documents are not online and accessible in 2018 and quite bizarre that the chair of the commission would not recognize the importance.

Thank you for your service Chairman Cheit.
 


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