The Herald Journal’s editorial board hit the mark dead on with their Sunday editorial about ethical lines being blurred in Cache County politics in relation to the appointment of a new Cache County attorney.
Specifically, the HJ calls into question the endorsement of James Swink by current attorneys in the CCAO. What happens if Joe Chambers is selected for the position and all the employees who endorsed his opponent now have to work under him? What happens if one attorney endorsed Swink and all the others endorsed Chambers and shortly after Swink gets appointed, he promotes the one who supported him?
Also, the paper questions Deputy Cache County Attorney Don Linton’s gifting of prints he’d painted to the members of the Cache Republicans central committee who voted at the mini-convention.
The editorial concludes with this paragraph:
Quite likely no law was broken with either the endorsements or gifts, but simple ethical questions do clearly arise in both instances. The people prosecuting the law in our county should be keenly aware of such boundaries and take greater pains not to cross them.
There seems to be a gap between what members of the county government think is ethical and what some of us in the media believe is ethical. KVNU, The Herald Journal and the Salt Lake Tribune all thought the meeting where the County Council discussed this appointment should be kept entirely in the open, for ethical and openness reasons, and the County Council unanimously disagreed.
I, and apparently the Herald Journal, feel there were some significant ethical lapses in this appoinment process and the election before it. It’s disappointing that those involved can’t see such lapses themselves, or worse yet, are apathetic.
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