Meet the new members of the Ethics Board

A revamped Ethics Board is taking shape, with three new members approved by the Town Board, and there will most likely be two more members joining them by the middle of next month.

By a unanimous resolution on March 11, the Town Board replaced the current membership of the Ethics Board, appointing Deborah Grayson, Duff Wilson and Michael DeSanctis. The former Board had largely been moribund for the past several years.

According to the Town Code, members appointed by the Town Board “shall render advisory opinions to Town employees on written request and, upon request of the Town Board, make recommendations to such Town Board.”

The Town Board also called for a public hearing on April 8 to consider expanding the Ethics Board, from three members to five, with at least one member being an elected or appointed Town employee. If the expansion is approved, two new members will be appointed.

The reason for the expansion is to “broaden the makeup of the Board and increase the effectiveness and efficiency thereof,” the resolution states.

If the Ethics Board is expanded, the elected or Town employee is already in place, in the person of Mr. DeSanctis, who works for the Building Department. He said he had been asked by Councilwoman BJ Ianfolla if he was interested in being a member and accepted her suggestion to apply for the position.

Like his colleagues on the newly constituted Board, Mr. DeSanctis said the overriding impetus to join was “to make a contribution to the Town.”

Mr. DeSanctis had a career on Wall Street, mainly as a derivatives broker, before retiring. He has deep roots on the Island; his brother is Father Peter DeSanctis, pastor of Our Lady of the Isle.

He’s looking forward to working with Ms. Grayson and Mr. Wilson. “Deborah and Duff are stimulating, interesting people and we’ll work well together,” he said, adding that “there was a need for a new Board and when it was reconstituted I thought I could help.”

Ms. Grayson has been a part-time Islander for almost 40 years. “I’ve gotten more and more involved with this magical place over time,” she said. She’s on the Heights Property and Roads Committee, the executive committee of the Fresh Pond Neighbor’s Association, and the Shelter Island Association.

Ms. Grayson has wide experience in looking into ethical matters. For the past six years she’s co-chaired the Visiting Nurse Service of NY’s Hospice Ethics Committee. She’s a member of the Empire State Bioethics Consortium, a group formed at the beginning of the pandemic to address pandemic-related issues such as the allocation of scarce resources.

“They’ve since expanded their mandate to include other bioethical areas with a strong emphasis on equality and justice in health care,” Ms. Grayson said. “I review proposals for potential presentation at the annual American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Conference. I’m trained in bioethical mediation and am in the process of being certified as a health care ethics consultant.”

Ms. Grayson said no recent events sparked her interest in becoming a member of the Ethics Board. “I applied for the position because of my passion for and knowledge of bioethics, which I thought might be a good base for me to use when thinking about the Island’s ethical concerns.”

Mr. Wilson has had a long and distinguished career as an investigative reporter for Reuters and The New York Times, among other news outlets. He’s been a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times, and the teams of reporters he’s worked with have won dozens of awards.

He’s taught investigative reporting as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is the author of “Fateful Harvest,” an investigation into an environmental catastrophe inflicted on a small American town due to the dumping of industrial byproducts. 

“I chaired and led a Seattle Times committee that wrote the first ethics code there some years ago,” Mr. Wilson said. “It was successful. I’ve been subject to comprehensive ethics codes myself as a journalist over many years. My work frequently involved finding and applying legal and ethical standards in an objective manner.”

A part-time Islander since 2006, Mr. Wilson moved here full-time four years ago. Joining the Ethics Board “would be a good way for me to contribute to the community,” he said. “Ethics issues have been in the news here lately. It’s a good fit for me.”

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