Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, has made anti-corruption measures a central pledge.
Her proposal combines personnel restrictions, contract information disclosure, and political-funding transparency.
However, it is important to distinguish between a candidate’s announcements and the rules that could actually be enforced after winning office.
3-Line Summary
1. Acton has pledged anti-corruption executive actions
2. She has also proposed disclosing contracts worth more than 50,000 dollars
3. Executive orders alone have limitations
A First-Day Executive Order and a 100-Day Review Team
Acton said that, if elected, she would begin anti-corruption measures with an executive order on her first day in office. One of her key pledges is a task force to examine state government and find waste, fraud, and abuse. The body was presented as a mechanism that would hear from residents, conduct audits, and issue recommendations for improvement within 100 days of her inauguration.
The candidate argued that Ohio residents collectively bear the cost of corruption. At an event in Columbus, she said her electricity bill had risen by 140 dollars that summer, offering the example to suggest that corruption is connected not only to abstract political issues but also to the cost of living. However, this statement was an example cited by the candidate, not a definitive explanation establishing the entire cause of the change in electricity rates.
News 5 Cleveland WEWS reported that multiple public corruption cases had emerged in Ohio over the past 10 years. The report mentioned the FirstEnergy bribery case, the case involving the publicly funded online charter school ECOT, which was found to have inflated its attendance figures, and matters surrounding the retired teachers’ pension fund STRS. Acton’s pledge is based on the issue that institutions and oversight have not changed sufficiently even after such cases.
A Pledge to Establish a 3-Year Standard for “Revolving-Door” Appointments
What Acton has particularly targeted is the revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they regulate. She said she would not appoint to a regulatory agency overseeing a particular industry anyone who had worked or been paid as a lobbyist, lawyer, or consultant in that industry during the previous 3 years. The proposal also includes requiring applicants to disclose their relationships with industry and the compensation they received.
She said she would require an ethics pledge containing a 3-year cooling-off period for the issue of appointees moving into industries they had overseen after leaving office. Up to this point, these are the candidate’s pledges. Because the plan was announced before the election, it cannot be read as an existing regulation or finalized law.
Katherine Turcer of the Ohio watchdog group Common Cause Ohio praised the candidate for making serious problems a priority. At the same time, she warned that it would be difficult to restrict an appointee’s employment after leaving office through the governor’s executive actions alone. She explained that a law may contain an enforcement mechanism, while an ethics pledge may not carry the same coercive force. In other words, restrictions at the stage of appointing public officials and mechanisms for penalizing violations after they leave office are separate issues.
Contracts Over 50,000 Dollars and a JobsOhio Review Plan
In the area of political funding, Acton also said she would reduce the influence of so-called dark money, meaning political spending whose funding sources are opaque. Her proposal would require state contractors to disclose their donors when spending money on political campaigns and would create a database containing information on companies bidding for state contracts.
The threshold proposed by the candidate is contracts exceeding 50,000 dollars. Companies bidding on contracts above this amount would be required to disclose their beneficial owners, shareholders holding 10% or more of the equity, and political donation records. The proposal is intended to make the ownership structures and political activities of companies seeking contracts visible together, but it was not an implemented system at the time of the announcement.
Acton also said she would conduct a comprehensive review of JobsOhio. JobsOhio is the state’s nonprofit economic-development organization, and it has been reported that much of its operations are subject to limitations under the state’s public-records law. The candidate’s review plan, too, should be distinguished as a plan to pursue if elected, rather than the result of an audit or investigation that has already been completed.
The campaign of Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy criticized the proposal. By contrast, the political-reform group End Citizens United argued that disclosure requirements for contractors could help provide a clearer picture of political spending. Both responses are statements of position made during the election process, not evidence that the effects of the disclosure requirements have been established. What is clear in this pledge is that Acton has identified the connection among personnel, contracts, and political funding as a problem. What remains undecided is the scope of the legal authority that could be used to sever that connection.
References
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