Posted on: Thursday, May 30, 2002

EDITORIAL
Reminder of how to keep politics aside

For many hard-working government employees, summer and fall of even-numbered years are the worst of all. That's when the pressure, subtle or sometimes not so subtle, is on to get out and work on the campaigns of their elected employers.

If you like your job and the way things are going around here, the message goes, you might want to help out with sign-waving, volunteering or other campaign chores.

Political appointees simply have to grin and bear it. They owe their jobs to patronage. Civil service workers can, and do, say no, but it creates awkwardness and strained relations in the work place.

To ease the pressure, and to make at least a minimal effort at keeping a level political playing field, the state Ethics Commission has fairly strict rules about what is, and what is not, permitted by state workers and in state work places.

There should be no need to be reminded of these rules, because they are common sense. It's forbidden to use state resources — time, equipment or people — to benefit individual candidates. That should go without saying but, unhappily, it cannot.

There has been far less abuse of state resources for political purposes now than there was a decade ago. That's due in part to more vigorous administration of the ethics rules and in part to greater sophistication on the part of state employees and their bosses.

Whatever the reason, it is a good trend. Keeping state resources out of the political process is the right thing to do, for other candidates, for state workers and for the taxpayers as well.

The convictions of a couple of City Council members in recent months suggest that diversion of county resources to political purposes was more common. But we'd bet the prison sentences will serve as a powerful deterrent.