{"id":45497,"date":"2019-03-27T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/senate-votes-to-rollback-conflict-of-interest-restrictions\/"},"modified":"2019-04-01T12:09:25","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T20:09:25","slug":"senate-votes-to-rollback-conflict-of-interest-restrictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/senate-votes-to-rollback-conflict-of-interest-restrictions\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate votes to roll back conflict of interest restrictions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Senate voted on Wednesday to rollback some conflict of interest laws that some lawmakers said were too broad and restricted legislators from being able to do their <\/a>jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“It really comes to your constitutional duty to be able to speak freely as a member of Alaska’s Senate or House,” Sen. John Coghill, R-North Pole, said. “When do you throttle back the 32,000 people and their voice? And when is it a real conflict with you? I don’t know that we’ve got the perfect balance… It’s meant to be accountability structures… that if you’re grandizing yourself at the state expense with your authority, you should be held accountable.”<\/p>\n

Majority Leader Mia Costello said the reason the bill was before the senate was because lawmakers realized they need to return some common sense to unintended consequences of HB <\/a>44<\/a>, a bill which required legislators to declare if they or a family member are financially affected by legislation under discussion. The conflict has to be worth at least $10,000, the bill stated. If the legislation comes to the floor of the House or Senate, the lawmaker had to declare a conflict there and request to be excused from voting. It only took one objection from another legislator to force that person to vote, though, according to the law.<\/p>\n

[Legislature’s new ethics law extends to private discussions<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n

Sen. Shelley Hughes, R-Palmer, said she had to halt her work on health care issues because her spouse works in the health care field.<\/p>\n

“These are flaws that surfaced, we all understand they need to be fixed,” Hughes said. “I’m just grateful I get to take this vote today.”<\/p>\n

The bill removing the restrictions passed 15-4, with Democratic Sens. Jesse Kiehl, Scott Kawasaki, Donald Olson and Bill Wielechowski voting nay.<\/p>\n

Coghill said that the HB 44 definition was too broad and it put a cloud over legislators’ heads. The new bill “resets” that, going back to some of the original language that the state had before HB 44.<\/p>\n

As a Republican from Anchorage, Costello said she was unable to have conversations about aviation in her office because her husband works for the industry.<\/p>\n

“My representing the district that has the Ted Stevens International Airport… means that I need to be able to talk about aviation,” Costello said. People knew her husband worked for the aviation industry when they voted for her, so it’s not a conflict of interest, she said.<\/p>\n

Several amendments were proposed, two by Kiehl and one by Sen. David Wilson, R-Wasilla. Neither passed.<\/p>\n

\n

\u2022 Contact reporter Mollie Barnes at mbarnes@juneauempire.com.<\/b><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five Democrats voted no on the rollback. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":502,"featured_media":45498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[448],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-45497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-state-legislature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/502"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45497"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=45497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}