When the Vermont House and Senate changed their rules in the mid-2010s to require legislators to disclose their financial interests and passed a law requiring the same of candidates, Vermont finally came in line with a majority of states.
But the information, while technically available to the public, is challenging both to unearth and decipher — in some cases coming in the form of barely legible handwritten documents. Some of those are available only by trudging to the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier and knowing who to ask.
To make this information available to Vermonters, VTDigger reporters rounded up all 180 legislators’ disclosures — those they filed as candidates and those they filed as lawmakers — and built a searchable, sortable database. The goal was to enable members of the public to gauge for themselves the potential conflicts of interest percolating under the Golden Dome.
VTDigger reporters then analyzed the data and reported out stories focused on what the reporters learned. Those stories, part of the Full Disclosure series, will be published throughout this week.
One key takeaway: What’s often notable in the disclosures is what isn’t there.
At the start of each biennium, the House requires its members to disclose only who employs them and on what boards they serve. The Senate asks for major sources of income, corporate ownership and board service. Neither body requires their members to disclose their spouse’s income, employment or board service — nor are members or spouses required to provide detailed financial information that could illuminate conflicts of interest.
In May of election years, legislative candidates are asked to submit a more comprehensive, three-page questionnaire assembled by the Secretary of State’s Office detailing their own and their spouses’ employment, incomes, investments, lobbying activity and board service.
Those forms are buried deep within the Secretary of State’s website, requiring a journey through a series of webpages that ultimately leads to a spreadsheet labeled simply, “2022 General Election Candidate Listing.” The website gives no indication that this is where candidate disclosure forms are kept.
If one knew to download the spreadsheet, one could then scroll to the far right and find a column of hyperlinks that finally lead to PDF scanned copies of the candidates’ disclosures. Such forms are not available for previous elections, so historical data is not readily available.
The candidate disclosure form is the same as what those running for statewide executive office are required to fill out, with one key difference: Legislative candidates don’t have to include their latest income tax returns.
According to Christina Sivret, executive director of the Vermont Ethics Commission, the information asked of candidates is “quite modest compared to other states.”
“Vermont is in a place where we're building out our ethics framework. We're at the early stages,” Sivret said in a February interview. “So compared to states that have had a robust ethics framework in place for a long time, our form is quite modest.”
What Vermont particularly lacks, Sivret continued, is enforcement of the ethics rules already on the books. There is, for example, no penalty for candidates who submit their disclosures late, or not at all. The ethics commission is pushing lawmakers to institute what Sivret called a “fairly modest” penalty of $10 per day that a form is late, with a maximum of $1,000.
According to Sivret, of the 48 states that require candidates to file financial disclosure forms, Vermont is the only one that has no statutory mechanisms to enforce its own rules.
“Despite financial disclosure being a legal requirement, the lack of a penalty creates a system of voluntary compliance, which does not always bring the desired results,” Sivret testified to the Senate Government Operations Committee on March 29.
Sivret’s request is, at least for now, on ice. During her March testimony, she implored senators to add language to a bill — H.429, a miscellaneous elections bill — instituting a fine. Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, who chairs the committee, told VTDigger this week that the bill is “on hold for a bit,” and the committee hasn’t yet incorporated the ethics commission’s proposed amendment.
“It's pretty basic, non-controversial stuff,” Sivret wrote in an email to VTDigger just days after her committee testimony, calling it "a test case" of the Legislature's commitment to ethics reform.
VTDigger’s database shows that, due to differences in the questions asked of candidates and of legislators, the intricacies of lawmakers’ financial situations can look very different from one form to the next. Take Sen. Kesha Ram-Hinsdale, D/P-Chittenden Southeast: Her official Senate disclosure form makes no mention of her husband Jacob Hinsdale’s Chittenden County-based property management company, Hinsdale Properties. Her candidate disclosure form does.
It’s not that Ram Hinsdale withheld information from the former. She just wasn’t asked.
There is another key flaw in relying on legislators’ election-year forms to garner an accurate picture of their potential conflicts of interest: They only have to fill them out every two years, when they’re running for office. By the time they swear their oaths, the information is nearly eight months out of date.
And should a lawmaker take office without running in an election, the candidate disclosure form is moot. For instance, Rep. Melanie Carpenter, D-Hyde Park, was appointed to her seat in March, after her predecessor, former Rep. Kate Donnally, D-Hyde Park, resigned from her post in January. Never a candidate, Carpenter was not subject to pre-election disclosure rules.
Once they’ve taken office, lawmakers are subject to a separate disclosure reporting system, dictated by their respective chambers’ rules. Even then, the House and Senate require members to fill out disclosure forms only once every two years — within 10 days of the start of the biennium.
While the House makes its members' disclosure forms accessible online, the Senate does not. Curious Vermonters must request physical copies, in-person, from the secretary of the Senate.
But what the Senate forms lack in accessibility, the House forms lack in scope.
House members are asked to identify any “boards, commissions, or similar entities that are regulated by law or that receive funding from the State” on which they serve. Then, there is a simple line to identify “my employer.” The form reiterates that salary disclosure is not required.
On the forms submitted in January, at the start of this biennium, 26 out of 150 representatives wrote that they were self-employed. Of those, 18 did not elaborate on the nature of their self-employment.
That could mask a conflict of interest, because if a lawmaker was a self-employed consultant and had clients with business before the Legislature, there would be no way to know based on their disclosure forms alone.
Numerous lawmakers wrote “not applicable” when queried on their employers, such as Rep. Angela Arsenault, D-Williston, a self-employed freelance writer. And yet more legislators left their employer information completely blank before signing at the bottom of the page.
For some, that meant their legislative work was their sole occupation, like Rep. Emilie Krasnow, D-South Burlington. Before running for office, she was a caregiver for her late mother for several years, she told VTDigger.
For others, their employment situations were in a gray area. Rep. Bobby Farlice-Rubio, D-Barnet, told VTDigger that he works for the state as a park ranger at Stillwater State Park — a seasonal, contract gig. He wrote “none” for his employer on his disclosure form. He won’t be under contract until the legislative session concludes, he explained.
Then there’s Rep. Daisy Berbeco, D-Winooski, who left her employer line blank. She said this week that she is “attempting to stand up a consulting business and have registered it but haven’t done any contracts under that entity yet due to the demands of my role in the legislature.” Because lawmakers aren’t required to file new disclosures unless and until they run for reelection, such changes in employment would not be known to the public until May 2024, if at all.
Some who did not divulge their employers on their official forms did list an employer on their candidacy forms. Take Rep. Robin Chesnut-Tangerman, D-Middletown Springs, who left his employer information entirely blank on his House disclosure form. According to his candidate disclosure form, he is a realtor with McChesney Real Estate.
Reached for comment, Chesnut-Tangerman said he left his employer information blank because, technically, he’s an independent contractor for McChesney. But asked how he would characterize his relationship with the firm, he said, “I would say employer-employee.”
“So I think I'm an employee, rather than self-employed,” he said. “It's just a little bit murky.”
If he were trying to hide his work for McChesney, Chesnut-Tangerman quipped, “I’m really bad at that.” He lists his work for the firm in his legislative biography, and his photo is on the firm’s homepage.
In the upper chamber, Vermont’s 30 senators are asked to provide more precise, pointed information: “State the source, but not amount, of all personal taxable income that generates more than $10,000.00 annually. If you are self-employed, indicate the nature of that employment,” the form requests.
Though that question could shed some light on senators’ potential conflicts, it would not illuminate all. For example, if a lawmaker held a sizable amount of stock in a publicly traded company with business before the state — say Casella Waste Systems or Keurig Dr. Pepper — they would likely not have to disclose that ownership, unless it generated more than $10,000 in income a year.
The question “What are your sources of income?” is fundamentally different from “Who is your employer?” — especially in a Legislature in which dozens of members are retired and many are landlords.
Some senators, therefore, offered more detailed portrayals of their lives outside the Statehouse on their disclosures than House members did. Nine senators reported earning Social Security benefits. Others reported their retirement accounts, pensions or rental income.
Asked this week if he saw the lack of probing questions in House disclosure forms as a problem, Chesnut-Tangerman said, “I understand the concern. I don’t see it as a pressing problem.”
He considered the prospect of having to disclose financial investments — as members of Congress are required to — and said, “I don't think that there should be a requirement for listing where investments are because that, I think, is political.” He offered fossil fuel investments as an example.
Isn’t that exactly the kind of investment lawmakers should disclose?
“That's a good argument. I don't know,” he said. “I think certainly daylight and clarity about potential conflicts of interest are worth knowing or worth publicly declaring.”
Next up in VTDigger’s Full Disclosure series: The Legislature’s rules define a conflict of interest so narrowly that they almost never prevent lawmakers from crafting and voting on bills — even when they or their employers stand to benefit financially.
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The Link Lonk
April 18, 2023 at 06:03PM
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Full Disclosure: Vermont’s legislative ethics forms are hard to find, out of date and limited in scope - VTDigger
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