• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Conflict of interest

This change has been needed for a long time, so three cheers to Gov. Mitch Daniels for proposing it:

INDIANAPOLIS - Indiana allows local government employees to serve on their own governing bodies -- meaning they can vote to raise their own pay or give themselves other perks at taxpayer expense.

But Gov. Mitch Daniels and the Local Government Reform Commission want the practice to be banned. Daniels says he'll ask the Indiana General Assembly to bar local government employees from being elected to the governing bodies that oversee their jobs.

It's just stupid to create such blatant conflicts of interest by allowing people to serve in both the legislative and executive branches of the same political unit. Our editorial page has specifically not endorsed candidates we otherwise thought well of -- such as City Councilman and city police officer Marty Bender -- because of that conflict. The candidates always say they can be objective, even recuse themselves when necessary, but I think they end up too close to the issues to always know when they have a conflict.

Quantcast