contributed photo The Iowa Legislature’s ethics code takes a narrow view of lawmakers’ conflicts of interest.

Aprogressive interest group filed an ethics complaint against a state senator, alleging he had a conflict of interest regarding a bill he was assigned to manage. The Senate Ethics Committee declined last week to move forward with the complaint.

That’s not a surprise, given the narrow view Iowa lawmakers have traditionally taken with regard to lawmakers’ personal interests in legislation.

The complaint, from the progressive community action group Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, alleged that Sen. Mike Bousselot, R-Ankeny, breached the Senate’s code of ethics by refusing to advance a bill opposed by his former employer. The bill, House File 565, would have restricted the ability of liquid carbon dioxide pipelines to use eminent domain to force easements on unwilling property owners.

Bousselot’s former employer owns Summit Carbon Solutions, which is one of three companies trying to advance multibillion-dollar pipeline projects. He was assigned to chair the subcommittee on the legislation, giving him the power to kill the bill by refusing to bring it up. That’s what he did.

It looks like insider influence, at the very least. The Senate Code of Ethics says senators “have a duty to conduct themselves so as to reflect credit on the general assembly, and to inspire the confidence, respect, and trust of the public, and to strive to avoid both unethical and illegal conduct and the appearance of unethical and illegal conduct.”

But the ethics code also acknowledges that senators occasionally will need to vote on bills that will affect their employment and pocketbooks. Lawmakers are taxpayers, and nobody blinks when they vote to cut their own taxes. We’re accustomed to and even expect there will be teachers on the education committee, farmers on the agriculture committee, medical professionals dealing with health care legislation and business owners shaping economic development bills.

Another Republican, Rep. Megan Jones of Sioux Rapids did recuse herself from voting on the same bill on the House floor. One of the proposed pipeline projects affects her family’s farm in southern Clay County. She had a direct financial stake in the legislation and she was right to step aside.

Even if she had chosen to vote and someone complained, however, the ethics committee might not sanction her because the bill wasn’t exclusively for her benefit. She’s among hundreds of landowners who will be affected by the pipelines.

Bousselot doesn’t work for Summit today and while they may still have his loyalty, we don’t have evidence that he has a financial interest in the company. If he does, he would be required to disclose it and he should have recused himself. And even if he doesn’t, as Sen. Pam Jochum pointed out, he still should have stepped aside.

As the ethics code points out, the appearance of conflict is just a damaging to the Legislature’s reputation.

“Senator Bousselot has at the very least, exercised questionable judgment and at worse, engaged in the appearance of unethical conduct,” Jochum said. “This is one of those times when a senator should have declined to serve as a subcommittee chair of a bill that had a direct financial gain for Summit Solutions.”

The appearance of conflict is hard to pin down because it depends on perceptions. And perceptions are notoriously unreliable when mixed with politics. Even so, it seems like lawmakers are increasingly taking an active role in legislation despite an obvious personal interest.

Republican lawmakers pushed through a previously failed bill this year to limit liability for commercial truckers whose employees cause accidents. Leading the bill in the Senate was none other than the chairman of the Iowa Motor Truck Association, Sen. Adrian Dickey of Packwood, whose organization wrote the bill and whose company would benefit directly from it.

A controversial bill that curtails the authority of the state auditor’s office stemmed from a case in which the auditor attempted to investigate an taxpayer-funded organization whose board members frequently met at out-of-state resort locations. The House floor manager of that bill was Rep. Michael Bergan of Dorchester, one of the members of the board whose junkets the auditor wanted to review.

Last year, the House floor manager of legislation that significantly curtailed Iowa’s bottle bill was Rep. Brian Lohse, R-Bondurant, the owner of a grocery store. Grocers were allowed to opt out of accepting returns for the containers they sell.

There are other examples, and I expect we’ll see a few more before this session is over. And those are just the appearances of direct conflict. Insider influence – lawmakers running bills for their neighbors, their pals and, of course, their benefactors, is rampant.

The Legislature’s code of ethics has changed little over the years and for the most part, it’s pretty solid. But lawmakers need to revisit their rules on conflicts of interest. If a lawmaker can floor-manage a bill his own lobbying organization wrote for the significant financial benefit of its members, or carry out a grudge match against a statewide elected office, the law is outdated, to say the least.

In the past, perhaps, the law worked because lawmakers exercised personal ethics and conscience in avoiding the appearance of conflict. Those days are gone.

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Kathie Obradovich has been covering Iowa government and politics for more than 30 years, most recently as political columnist and opinion editor for the Des Moines Register.