Shelter Island Ethics Board puts focus on conflicts of interest: Presents annual report on its work

The Shelter Island Board of Ethics, in its second annual report to the Town Board, noted that significant progress has been made since new members revitalized the old Ethics Board in March 2022.

It had been moribund to the point that then-Supervisor Gerry Siller said he was unaware there even was an active Ethics Board.

Active would be the correct term for the new group. It met nine times last year and issued six formal opinions. Four of the formal opinions forwarded to the Town Board were in response to questions from Town employees.

The other two opinions were responses to complaints that some Town advisory board members had not disclosed conflicts of interest, or had not properly recused themselves from deliberations at meetings. In both of those cases, the report said, after investigating the charges, the Ethics Board decided that the advisory board members had “acted appropriately”.

In the past 12 months, there was a year-long review of best practices in small-town ethics codes, and one was recommended to the Town Board, which adopted it.

In a letter to the Town Board, Ethics Board Chairperson Duff Wilson — other members are  Laura Cunningham, Deborah Grayson, Shelby Mundy and Robert Raiber — wrote: “The new code for the first time meets minimum standards of state law and allows outside complaints, in addition to confidential employee requests. We also published a ‘Plain English Guide’ to the new code, and began five-year overlapping terms for Ethics Board members.”

The Ethics Board letter to the Town Board stated that, three times over the past year, the group gave “informal guidance where time or circumstances didn’t allow a full Opinion.”

The most significant guidance for town officials is to not appoint individuals to positions in the Town Assessor’s office who own or work for real estate businesses, because of potential conflicts of interest.

The other two acts of guidance forwarded to the Town Board was over issues of members of advisory panels recusing themselves.

In its letter, the Ethics Board stated: “The latter is a difficult issue guided by common law and court cases, but not always by the bright-line financial conflict-of-interest standards of state law. We offered the best general advice we can at this time: Recusal is mandatory for potential financial conflicts-of-interest under state law and our Town code of ethics. Recusal is optional for Town officials in instances where for any reason they may feel they have a bias or personal connection that would potentially make it harder for them to put the public interest above any private interest. Recusal from discussion and voting should be considered in occasions where a reasonable person would foresee an appearance of impropriety.”

For 2024, the Ethics Board said its goals “would be to codify and publish our internal procedures, as well as our opinion summaries to the extent possible.”