Bill stressing ethics not considered

Boise Senate leaders Wednesday refused to consider a bill that would have tightened ethics laws by barring officials leaving government service from going to work in the same field in the private sector for one year.

However, the committee did agree to consider separate legislation to make it illegal for officials to influence the award of a state contract to a particular vendor.

The bills were sponsored by Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, to the Senate State Affairs Committee.

“I wanted to ensure that when the public is paying someone’s salary, we would expect they would be working in the public interest,” Schroeder said.

Both bills were aimed at Idaho’s emerging charter school industry, though Schroeder refused to point to specific instances.

Schroeder said the first bill was modeled after federal anti-corruption laws that are on the books in 30 other states.

He said that the kind of situation he was trying to avoid would be akin to a public utilities commissioner working on rules that would benefit a specific power company and then going to work for that power company.

The bill was opposed by Senate Majority Leader Bart Davis, a lawyer, who questioned whether he would be barred from practicing law under any issue that he addressed as a lawmaker.

Schroeder said that he wasn’t sure but that he expected ethics rules in the legal profession would prevail.

Davis was not convinced. He said that Idaho’s smaller pool of specialized professionals would make the law too unwieldy and that specific problems had been addressed.

Other members were concerned that college professors who want to open a private business based on their research could be excluded.

The legislation failed on a 5-1 vote. Schroeder’s other bill was unanimously approved but will be sent to the Senate floor for technical amendments.

Four new senators left out of the loop

Some constituents of four freshman state senators assumed their newly elected lawmakers were ignoring them.

But because of a glitch in the Statehouse computer system, the four weren’t notified anyone had tried to call.

They were Republican Senators Joyce Broadsword of Cocolalla, Chuck Coiner of Twin Falls, Tim Corder of Mountain Home and John McGee of Caldwell.

When a constituent calls a legislator, the lawmaker is notified by e-mail.

But if the e-mail is missing from the computer system, the record of a telephone call is printed, said Statehouse IT supervisor Glenn Harris.

Yet in the case of the four new senators, they received neither a printout nor an e-mail, he said.

The four had not received notification of their calls since the incumbents vacated their seats.

“Whoever they replaced was probably getting the e-mail,” he said.

“We haven’t had a problem like this before.”

Coiner said the list of missed calls, dating from January and February, took up 19 pages.

The freshman legislators and the Statehouse workers missed the problem because the freshmen didn’t know they were missing phone calls until some irate constituents let them know they were unhappy about unreturned calls.

The computer problem has been fixed, Harris said. It was discovered Monday.