West Virginia’s grade in the latest edition of the Center for Public Integrity’s State Integrity Investigation dropped from a D-plus to a D. However, the state moved up from 27th to 17th nationally, as most states scored dismally when it came to open and transparent government.
Released Monday, the assessment of government transparency and accountability gave failing grades to 11 states, while only three states earned higher than D-plus. Alaska topped the list with a grade of only a C.
A summary of the investigation notes, “In state after state, open records laws are laced with exemptions, and part-time legislators and agency officials engage in glaring conflicts of interests and cozy relationships with lobbyists. Meanwhile, feckless, understaffed watchdogs struggle to enforce laws as porous as honeycombs.”
Citing federal court decisions that prevent the secretary of state’s office from enforcing contribution limits to independent political groups, the investigation’s summary for West Virginia states, “This new reality, combined with the state’s weak open record laws, has resulted in West Virginia earning an overall grade of D, ranking the state 17th out of 50 in the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven assessment of state government accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.”
The study gave West Virginia failing grades for Public Access to Information — citing a lack of any appeals process for Freedom of Information request denials short of filing suit in circuit court — Political Financing, Electoral Oversight, and Judicial Accountability.
It gave a D-minus for Civil Service Management, D for Procurement, D-plus for Lobbying Disclosure, and for Ethics Enforcement Agencies, C-minus for Executive Accountability and Legislative Accountability, C for State Budget Processes, C-plus for Internal Auditing and a B-plus for State Pension Fund Management.
The report notes, “In the past few years, though, there have been some significant improvements in West Virginia on the accountability front. In 2014, the state Ethics Commission began conducting random audits of lobbyist spending reports for the first time since 2011.”
However, it faults a lack of improvement, since its last investigation released in 2012, regarding access to public information:
“West Virginia has no agency capable of enforcing its Freedom of Information Act, and there’s no way to appeal a rejection short of going to court. Last year, for example, the Charleston Gazette was forced to sue the state attorney general’s office after it refused to produce records related to a potential conflict of interest for the attorney general, whose wife was lobbying for a pharmaceutical company that the state was suing. In September, a state judge ruled that the attorney general did not have to turn over the records.”
In state ethics law, the investigation faults the state’s failure to require lobbyists to disclosure their salaries or compensation, as well as the Ethics Commission’s inability to post lobbyists’ financial disclosures, and disclosures for many public officials and candidates, on-line on the commission’s website.
Overall, West Virginia ranked eighth for ethics enforcement and 16th for lobbying disclosure nationally.
“That’s pretty good considering what little funding we receive and how small our staff is,” Ethics Commission Executive Director Rebecca Stepto said Monday of the investigation. “And, of course, we can only enforce what’s in the law.”
Understaffed, underfunded state watchdog agencies are a common theme in the investigation, which found that at least 60 percent of states inadequately fund those agencies.
At the extreme, it cited Delaware, where “the Public Integrity Commission, which oversees lobbying and ethics laws for the executive branch there, has just two full-time employees. A 2013 report by a special state prosecutor found that the agency was unable “to undertake any serious inquiry or investigation into potential wrongdoing.”
West Virginia’s Ethics Commission has just six full-time and two part-time employees.
“They complete an unbelievable amount of work, but we can’t get everything done right away,” Stepto said.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said Monday the governor had no comments on the investigation, beyond those in the report attributed to his office.
Reach Phil Kabler at philk@wvgazette.com, 304-348-1220, or follow @PhilKabler on Twitter.