Ethical path narrow and dangerous

MORGAN

© St. Petersburg Times
published June 1, 2002

Legislators walk a dangerous line when they try to pass laws about their own professions. But they've made themselves almost immune to conflict of interest charges.

Such is life in a "citizen legislature" where members are part-time officials.

Except for a few members who are independently wealthy or willing to scrape by on $28,600 a year, most legislators have day jobs.

Trouble often arises when lawmakers who are doctors, lawyers or members of a regulated profession try to tinker with the laws that govern their respective jobs. The problem is also apparent when a legislator hired by a school board or college starts working on the state education budget or tinkering with school laws.

The prospects are endless. The very people who know the most about the problems of a profession often are on committees that establish the laws that profession lives by. If they also are ethically challenged, weird things happen.

The latest to run into trouble is Rep. Dennis K. Baxley, R-Ocala. Baxley is a funeral director who says he is incensed about the state's failure to adequately regulate the death industry.

So incensed was Baxley that he walked over to the Senate this year and testified in support of a measure that would have stripped Comptroller Bob Milligan of the power to regulate pre-need contracts sold by funeral homes and cemeteries.

Almost everyone else, including Milligan, opposed the measure, though Milligan supports the general concept as long as financial experts are involved.

Baxley told the Senate that consumers "are getting the run-around" and criticized Milligan's office. Baxley wanted all regulation of the industry transferred to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, a hopeless bureaucracy known to let complaints languish for years.

Other funeral home owners supported leaving regulation with Milligan, saying the transfer could result in a horrible scandal because DBPR lacks the expertise to oversee the $500-million in pre-need trust funds.

Rep. Nancy Detert, R-Venice, found herself caught in the middle after she agreed to be the lead sponsor of a bill Baxley wanted.

Legislators often ask other lawmakers to sponsor legislation when they are trying to distance themselves from a bill. Detert says Baxley told her he needed help because he had filed the maximum number of bills allowed in the House. Baxley and others became cosponsors.

Detert is a mortgage broker who happens to idolize Milligan, a retired Marine general who probably has the best reputation of any of the state's elected officials.

When Detert discovered Milligan opposed the measure along with others in the funeral and cemetery industry, she began to smell a rat and spent a lot of time killing her own bill.

This rat wore a suit and tie.

Milligan's office started investigating Baxley's funeral business in the spring of 2000. It surfaced this week when Milligan filed 556 charges against the operation for violating laws governing pre-need contracts and cemeteries.

Baxley insists he thought it was just a routine audit, not an investigation. He also insists his business "cooperated" with Milligan's office.

That depends on how you define cooperate.

Detert says killing her own bill didn't stop Baxley. He also offered his idea as an amendment to other bills, to the chagrin of legislators who suddenly found their innocuous bills in trouble.

"I thought his persistence was a red flag," Detert said Friday.

The pitfalls are obvious to the rest of us but there is something about being elected to public office that tends to put blinders on some people.

Supporters of our citizen legislature say the alternative would be professional politicians passing all the laws.

Floridians might settle for lawmakers who see themselves as public servants instead of trying to tinker with the laws that govern their own professions.

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