FUNDING CUTS

The Legislature cut the ethics commission’s budget 41 percent from 2008 to 2011. The budget increased around $250,000 this year, in part to meet new responsibilities. cials filing reports directly with the office.

Budget cuts have infringed on some of the commission’s basic functions, such as putting campaign finance data online.

Currently, reports mailed in by candidates are not being scanned into the online system. Anyone who wants to see them must come to the ethics commission’s downtown Atlanta office and pay search and retrieval fees, according to a message on the commission’s website.

State law requires that the commission review every report filed with it. That’s never been done, mostly because the Legislature keeps increasing the number of reports the commission is responsible for while decreasing its budget.

Holly LaBerge, the commission’s current executive secretary, said the commission set a goal of randomly auditing 10 percent of reports filed, but due to limited staff that project has been set aside in favor of reviewing complaints filed with the office.

‘At the mercy of legislators’

The commission’s aging network of computer servers has become increasingly creaky, and officials who rely on it to file their required paperwork complain of outages during peak times. Brian Hess, a Mariettabased information technology consultant who built the system, blamed the computer system’s unpredictability on budget cuts.

“You know the Legislature on ethics,” he said. “In front of people, ‘We support it.’ And behind their backs they don’t fund it.”

Hess worked for the commission as its computer chief during Thompson’s administration. At the time, the system had built-in redundant servers and a full IT staff supporting it.

“Before I left it was just me and one other guy,” he said.

This summer, LaBerge signed contracts to spend up to $240,000 a year to acquire server space for the commission’s massive databases and to shore up the system’s operations.

That the ethics commission is perpetually underfunded is just part of the problem, said Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus. Where it gets its money is another, he said.

“It’s difficult for there to be an independent investigative agency if they are annually at the mercy of the legislators that they are supposed to regulating,” he said. “They are the only ones who are in a position to regulate members of the General Assembly. ... Unfortunately they’ve been largely sidelined by the changes that have been made in the law over the last couple years.”

A number of states, including Alabama, have dedicated funding sources for their ethics commissions, a move intended to keep politics out of their annual budgets.

House Majority Whip Ed Lindsey, R-Atlanta, who has penned several fixes to the state ethics law in recent years, gave the current commission a “B-minus to B” grade but said anything less than an A is unsatisfactory.

“Most of the problems involve timeliness,” he said. “That can certainly be aided by additional funding and we are looking into the issue of how much and where is the best place to spend it.”

He doesn’t buy the idea that the ethics commission had a “golden era,” in part because changes in the state ethics law are always putting new burdens on the commission.

“Since 2005, we have expanded the transparency requirements, but there has been a constant public thirst for more — as is the people’s right as the owners of the government,” Lindsey said. “For that reason, I want to focus on where we are and where the public believes we need to be. That should be our focus this fall as we head toward next January.”