Ethics Commissioners: Lawmakers Went Backward in 2015

_{Editor's note: This story has been updated to add details on an ethics complaint filed against Sen. Joan Huffman.} 

That legislative session Gov. Greg Abbott sought to devote to ethics? Texas ethics regulators are far from impressed.

“If there was any ethics reform, it was in reverse,” Paul Hobby, chairman of the Texas Ethics Commission, said Thursday at a public meeting that came less than 10 days after lawmakers adjourned their 84^th session with the following accomplishments:

• Creating a new loophole to protect lawmaker spouses from certain financial disclosure
• Giving themselves and state bureaucrats hometown prosecution when they're accused of white-collar crimes in Austin
• Failing to agree on and pass sweeping ethics reform

“There are some bills on the governor’s desk that just scare me to death,” Commissioner Jim Clancy, the body’s former chairman, said at the meeting.

The bipartisan commissioners largely focused on Thursday on measures awaiting Abbott’s signature that would open up a “spousal loophole” allowing politicians to shield information about their spouses’ financial holdings.

The proposals would essentially repeal an agency rule, drafted last year in the wake of ethics violations by a former House member, that spells out what must be included in personal financial statements filed by the governor, members of the Legislature and other high-ranking state officials – including certain information about their spouses’ property and financial activity.

Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, pushed the changes as amendments to two different bills: House Bill 3736, an effort to otherwise increase transparency and curb conflicts of interest on state boards and commissions, and House Bill 3511, which Rep. Sarah Davis, R-West University Place, has said achieves "targeted disclosure." 

Clancy and three others on the eight-member commission – Vice Chairman Chase Untermeyer and Commissioners Hugh Akin and Bob Long – recently sent Abbott a letter urging him to veto the two bills. They wrote the letter in their personal capacity, Clancy said, not as commissioners.

Untermeyer told The Texas Tribune that his colleagues supported Davis' original legislation until Huffman "fatally infected" it with her amendment. The commissioners requested the vetoes "with great pain," he said.

Despite the anti-ethics inertia, a few smaller ethics reforms did reach the governor’s desk. That includes a bill by Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, ending the double-dipping loophole that allowed longtime politicians like former Gov. Rick Perry to draw a salary and pension at the same time. Turner also helped add an amendment to a separate bill requiring state officials to reveal pensions and "public benefits" on their annual disclosures. Abbott has said he favors the ideas.

Lawmakers also moved to require more sunlight on elected officials who profit from government contracts or certain public debt-financing deals. Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, successfully pushed a bill requiring governmental entities to provide to the Texas Ethics Commission a list of people who have a controlling interest in their significant contracts.

Clancy told the Tribune that Capriglione deserves a "substantial amount of credit" for passing that legislation, though even it, too, was watered down from its original version. 

Terri Langford and Jay Root contributed to this report.