Attorney General may have benefited from weak rules

Frontiersman editorial board

Without so much as a wink or a nod, Attorney General Gregg Renkes claimed vindication and took independent investigator Robert Bundy's report to the bank. Bundy recently completed his investigation of Renkes's involvement in a potential sale of Alaska coal to Taiwan and his ownership of stock in a company that might have benefited from such a deal.

Since October, Renkes has been under a constant barrage of accusations from the press and from several Democrats and some Republicans. The charge was that Renkes was engaged in a conflict of interest because he owned, and was trading stock, in a company that could benefit from his efforts to nail down the coal deal. The attorney general and Gov. Murkowski have maintained relative silence throughout the ordeal, urging people to wait for the report before passing judgment. Not surprisingly, Bundy's report has not put out the fire. What is surprising is that few people seem to grasp the reason why.

Bundy concluded that Renkes did not violate the Code of Ethics contained in the Ethics Act. Bundy did say it was a close call. He also found that Renkes should have sought guidance in the matter, and his failure to do so was a violation - so the state's leading law enforcement official didn't walk away with completely clean hands, but that infraction is more an error in judgment than anything else.

The most important paragraph in Bundy's 64-page report is the last one, however. In one sentence Bundy summed up Alaska's ethical woes. The report reads, "This controversy could have been avoided had a statute or regulations provided specific standards on when stock ownership constitutes a conflict of interest." Bundy recommends the state adopt such standards.

Every ethical question that has been raised over the past three years has boiled down to that same problem. Alaska legislators and officials slip out from under ethical quandaries, not because they're behavior is ethical, but because the state's definition of ethical behavior is unclear and weak. The response is always, "You see, I didn't break the rules." But if the rules are lacking, is that really anything to brag about? Alaskans deserve better. It's time to demand more accountability from our government. If officials can't determine the line between right and wrong, then it must be spelled out clearly. The Legislature should tackle that challenge during this session.