HB 1216 will bring badly needed upgrades for state ethics commission.

Filing an ethics complaint against a public official in Colorado may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Not only must you fill out initial paperwork with the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission, explains state Rep. BethMcCann, D- Denver, but the burden of investigating and presenting the case often falls upon the person who makes the accusation.

Yet most people are simply not equipped to undertake such a task, she told us. And soMcCann is sponsoring House Bill 1216 in part as a way to upgrade the ability of the commission to crack down on public officials who flout the law or ethics rules. It’s a concept whose time has come.

Ever since the ethics commission was created in 2006 by a voterpassed amendment, it has suffered fromseveral flaws. To begin with, it relies on the legal assistance of the attorney general, which is fine in some cases. But if the person accused of an ethics violation is a state employee or elected official, the AG’s office will be in the awkward position of providing legal assistance to them, too. HB 1216 requires the panel to retain or employ independent counsel rather than rely on the AG.

It’s no coincidence the attorney general favors the bill.

Among other things, the bill also requires the commission to issue rules on conflicts of interest for its own members, as well as regarding their involvement in political activity. The need for this became clear a couple of years ago when commissioner Bill Pinkham attended a fundraiser for Gov. John Hickenlooper a few days after he’d voted to dismiss an ethics complaint against the governor.

That complaint was dubious, but Pinkham’s conduct undermined the perception of fairness.

The state auditor recently issued a scathing audit of the commission that mentioned this lack of guidance on conflicts of interest. Among other gems in the audit: The commission “did not retain one or more key documents for 25 of the 53 complaints that were filed between January 2012 and June 2015 and did not maintain audio recordings of the hearings for 43 of the 53 complaints.”

Although HB 1216 appears to be a fairly innocuous bill, it barely passed out of a House hearing on a party line vote. And commission members themselves have complained they were not consulted before the bill was drafted.

The Colorado Municipal League testified in favor of the bill, but as it noted in its Statehouse Report, “It is apparent that some political spade work remains to be done on this bill. CML will be working with the proponents of this bill to avoid it becoming partisan— which it should not be.”