After a preliminary review, the Senate Ethics Panel has dismissed complaints against Sens. Scott Beck (R-Caledonia) and Seth Bongartz (D-Bennington), who both have ties to Vermont’s historic private academies, after finding their conduct did not represent an ethics violation under the Vermont Constitution or Senate rules.
Typically, ethics complaints to and responses from the ethics panel are kept confidential. But in these instances, the complainants shared their correspondence with Seven Days.
The first complaint, made in June by Friends of Vermont Public Education board member Geo Honigford, alleged that Beck and Bongartz pushed for provisions that would directly benefit St. Johnsbury Academy and Manchester’s Burr & Burton Academy while serving on a conference committee hashing out the final details of Act 73, a sweeping education law passed last session. Beck has taught history at St. Johnsbury Academy for decades, and Bongartz served as chair of Burr & Burton’s board of trustees for 15 years. As two of three senators on the conference committee, the men spent what some observers considered an outsized amount of time working to ensure that certain independent schools made out favorably under the legislation.
The second complaint, filed in July by Essex Westford school board chair Robert Carpenter, alleged ethical violations only against Beck. In a July 9 email to the ethics panel, Carpenter questioned why Beck didn’t openly disclose or recuse himself from education reform negotiations due to a conflict of interest. In his complaint, Carpenter attached an email exchange between himself and Beck in which Carpenter asked if it was “the will of the legislature and the governor to scale back public education in Vermont.” Beck replied “yes.”
Beck “has shaped agendas and priorities, taken up legislative time and capacity, and prevented desperately needed policy work from being completed all in his prioritization of the private education sector and his obvious interests therein,” Carpenter wrote.
Around the time the complaints were lodged, Beck called them “baseless,” and Bongartz said the suggestion that he had a conflict of interest because of his long-standing ties to Burr & Burton was “ludicrous.”
The senators on the ethics panel sided with their colleagues.
In letters to Honigford and Carpenter dated December 15, ethics panel chair Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden-Southeast) wrote that the five-member body had considered whether there was “probable cause” to believe an ethical violation occurred. The letters cite a memo on the ethics panel’s website that states Senate rules “prohibit members from voting on questions in which they have an ‘immediate or direct interest.'”
But, Ram Hinsdale wrote, under the rules, a question is only of “direct personal interest” if it pertains to a legislator personally, “such as a motion to censure the legislator.” And a question is only of pecuniary interest if it “provides benefits to a specific individual or corporation” and is not “a matter of general public interest.”
Because Act 73 relates to transforming Vermont’s education governance — “a matter of general public interest” — Beck and Bongartz’s involvement in the bill does not represent a conflict of interest, Ram Hinsdale’s letters state.
The panel also noted that Beck’s and Bongartz’s ties to independent schools were known to constituents before they were elected.
“To issue an ethical violation to a Senator solely for something known publicly prior to his election in the body may create a constitutional challenge and undermine the sovereignty of the electorate,” one letter states.
Bongartz said he “was never remotely concerned” about Honigford’s complaint, calling it “total nonsense.”
“It’s disappointing that somebody would try to weaponize the ethics system for purely political purposes,” he said.
Beck, meanwhile, wrote in a text message that the ethics panel’s decision “supports and demonstrates that I effectively represent the interests of all of the communities that I serve.”
Carpenter said he was disappointed, though not surprised, by the panel’s response. Regardless, he said, he stands by his decision to formally air his concerns, if only to make other legislators aware and perhaps prompt a higher level of scrutiny of Beck.
Honigford, meanwhile, chalked up the panel’s findings to Vermont’s relatively “weak” ethics laws compared to those of other states.
In Vermont, Honigford wrote, “there is no conflict unless your hand is caught in the cookie jar.”
This fall, Clayton Cargilll, chair of the Danville School Board, filed his own ethics complaint against Beck after the senator urged him and Cabot’s school board chair to consider closing their small high schools. Cargill alleged that closing Danville and Cabot and giving students school choice “would help ensure financial stability” for St. Johnsbury Academy. Cargill said last week that he had not yet received a response from the ethics panel.
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