Taking Action on Ethics at Reston Association--December 16 Meeting

Over the years, the Reston Association Board has faced questions about ethics. Going back maybe 10 years, I remember RA members raising questions about the big and expensive contractual arrangement for stream restoration. More recently, the controversial Lake Anne land swap giving an acre common area forest to a private group and, to a lesser extent, the referendum on the air-conditioning monopoly, RELAC, at Lake Anne have led to greater concerns about possible conflicts of interest among RA Board members.

In the last few weeks, the Reston Citizens Association reviewed conflict of interest statements submitted by current RA Board members and found several were incomplete, lacking information about financial interests and activities which could result in conflicts of interest. It turns out no one at the Association actually reviews conflict of interest information to assure completeness, for example.

Given the potential for ethical transgressions in an organization with a budget upwards of $35 million and common land and capital assets worth scores of millions more combined with the Association’s apparent lack of minimal protections against conflicts of interest and a record of allegations of unethical behavior, it seems timely to put in place a robust ethics policy and some kind of independent oversight mechanism. On December 16 at 6:00 PM, there will be Board work meeting to discuss the ethics issue and a proposal to do just that.

RA Director Rachel Muir has circulated a proposal to create a modest , but independent and transparent, oversight committee consisting of three non-RA Board members of the Association to be named by leading community organizations and one RA Board member. The committee would receive complaints of ethics violations, investigate them and report their findings to the RA Board AND to the membership simultaneously, As I understand it, the committee would NOT, however, be empowered to take action against a Board member. That would be left to the RA Board itself, helped to avoid the fox-in-the-chicken-coop syndrome by the effect of the light of the public findings.

While I might have preferred to give the independent committee some enforcement power, what Ms. Muir proposes would be a major step in the right direction to upgrade transparency and ethics at RA. One way to assure movement in the right direction is for Reston residents to attend the December 16 meeting at the Reston Association offices on Sunrise Valley Drive.