Effort under way to fill ethics panel seat

AUGUSTA – Legislative leaders remain hopeful of reaching agreement on a slate of potential candidates to fill a single seat on the five-member Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices.

House Majority Leader Glenn A. Cummings, D-Portland, said filling the vacant slot on the panel with an unenrolled candidate should be a top priority for legislative leaders who are preparing for the beginning of the new session that will begin next month.

The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices is an independent state agency that administers Maine’s campaign finance laws, the Maine Clean Election Act, and the lobbyist disclosure law. It also issues advisory opinions and conducts investigations regarding legislative ethics.

The panel consists of five members jointly appointed by the governor and legislative leaders for three-year terms. The commission is bipartisan, and no more than two members may be enrolled in the same political party. The four current seats are divided between Democrats and Republicans, and the unenrolled seat has been vacant since April when Terry MacTaggert, former chancellor of the University of Maine System, left the position.

Cummings said his staff had been working for months to develop a list of potential candidates, and House Republican leader David Bowles, R-Sanford, said his office also was attempting to make final decisions on selections. Republican and Democratic leaders will meet informally to develop the list of three potential candidates to submit to the governor who would be expected to select one of the submissions for appointment to the commission.

“I think there’s a sense of urgency,” Cummings said. “We are very committed to making sure that we have a quality, nonpartisan person.”

Bowles agreed it was important to resolve the vacancy and said “a couple of names” have been discussed among GOP leaders.

“Fortunately the commission has worked really well in a bipartisan way, and it’s sometimes hard down there to tell the Republicans from the Democrats by the way they’ve acted – and that’s a good thing,” Bowles said. “But we absolutely need to get this done.”

Jonathan Wayne, executive director of the commission, said the unenrolled or independent candidate cannot have been a member of the current or previous Legislature and must be a “person of recognized judgment, probity and objectivity.”

Although the commission has gotten by for the last eight months without any serious stalemates between the two Democrats and two Republicans, Wayne acknowledged it would be better if legislative leadership resolved the deficiency sooner rather than later.

“We have not had very many deadlock votes, but it is a problem because the commission needs to have three members present to have a quorum,” he said. “With only four people on the commission, if two people were to have a conflict then the commission can’t do any business.”