It’s not ‘just business’ when you’re a public figure

We found ourselves on familiar emotional ground when preparing for today’s paper the story of Lynn Gattis, her hay farm and the Mat-Su Borough’s payment to lease part of the land for a road it didn’t end up building.

It’s ground we tread when we talk borough ethics rules and about the role Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell cast himself in during our local elections.

It’s ground that marks the border between the ethical and the unethical and how those are perceived. We fully agree with Gattis, that she did nothing wrong by accepting the borough’s payment for right of way access. She was trying to help the rail extension project run smoothly by granting the borough an easement lease to build a haul road across her land. She asked for money to compensate for lost revenue from hay production. All of these are mundane business practices.

Where the ethical question comes in, however, is with what happened afterward.

The state Alaska Board of Agriculture and Conservation cried foul, demanding the easements be vacated or the Gattises repay the $600,000 balance on the loans they got to buy their hay farm. It was then that the borough decided it didn’t need that access road.

The Gattises kept the $65,225 the borough paid to lease right of way access for a haul road.

Were Lynn Gattis and her husband merely local business people, we likely would have never heard of this whole thing.

But because Lynn Gattis is a member of the school board and a candidate for the state house of representatives, we heard about it from multiple sources.

And that, we think, says a lot for why we would say that Gattis is in a gray area that her private citizen neighbors who also were paid for unused easements are not.

We hold our elected officials to a higher standard. We do that for a reason — our representatives are lawmakers — emphasis on “law,” double emphasis on “makers.” We require people tasked with deciding what is legal and what is illegal to have outstanding moral character. We require our elected representatives to follow the letter of the law down to the smallest detail. Anyone remember VECO?

In business, the line between the permissible and the impermissible lines up directly with the law. “It’s just business” is a common justification when someone is charged with engaging in some act that isn’t illegal but which doesn’t pass muster on a basic smell test.

“It’s just business” is not, and should not, be a shield that protects elected officials entrusted to spend public tax dollars for the public benefit.