JACKSON – No doubt, the current session of the Mississippi Legislature is facing many difficult issues.
There will be division on many of those issues. Efforts to deal with other issues will be stymied because of a tight state revenue stream.
But it seems that one issue that all sides could agree on is reforming the state’s ethics laws for public officials. The costs of such reforms would be non-existent probably and minimal at worse.
In many ways, the current ethics laws are a joke – lacking any teeth. The laws mandating the reporting of holdings and financial interests of public official is very limited.
While no one is asking public officials to reveal their net worth, it seems that more information should be available to the public to ascertain if officials face any conflicts of interest.
Plus, blind trust provisions should be included in the law so that when public officials put their assets in a blind trust, which is not necessarily a bad thing, we are not relying simply on a promise that the trust is indeed blind.
