Ethics panel: no violation against Sen. Ram Hinsdale

An ethics complaint filed in February against Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale citing her husband’s work in real estate was dismissed by a five-member committee last week.

The committee, the Senate Panel on Ethics, operates in near secrecy, and members of the committee were unable to discuss the complaint. They found there was no conflict between Ram Hinsdale’s work on legislation and her husband’s work. Jacob Hinsdale operates Hinsdale Properties, which has a sizable portfolio of rental properties in Burlington and elsewhere.

Because the committee did not find probable cause that an ethical violation occurred, the chair of the panel, Sen. Brian Campion, wrote, the “report is closed and shall remain confidential.”

The 14 Vermont residents who signed on to the complaint say that Ram Hinsdale’s work crafting Act 47, or the HOME Act, directly benefits her and her husband financially. The law passed last year mandates that duplexes be permitted in lots with water and sewer service that are zoned as single-family.

Through this legislation, Ram Hinsdale “was advocating for what was really in the best interest of her family,” said John Bossange, one of the complainants who has pushed back against efforts to develop housing.

Her role on the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing, and General Affairs should be scrutinized, he said.

“They have a vast array of holdings, and this is what they do. They break up homes, divide them like all those single-family homes on Loomis and Pearl streets in Burlington, and they’re making a ton of money,” he said. “For us, that’s a clear violation of a code of ethics and that’s why we filed a complaint.”

Ram Hinsdale, in an interview, pushed back against their assertions, and said the Senate ethics panel declined to investigate further “because we all have ties to our communities — our civic organizations, schools, pensions, churches.”

“You could find a conflict of interest and try to exploit that with every single member of the Legislature,” she said.

But questions about the committee’s practice of confidentiality have run into concerns over whether there is enough transparency in the process of reviewing complaints and determining whether they merit investigation.

“We need to take this process seriously and give it its due time,” Ram Hinsdale said. “But if we made it a spectacle, if it was some kind of process where anyone could drag someone’s name through the mud in an open hearing, it would be used against us all the time.”

Meeting in secret

The 14 complainants — Bossange and Rosanne Greco in South Burlington, Bill Stuono and Wolfer Schneider in Charlotte, and several others in towns like Plainfield, South Hero and Winooski, for example — believe Ram Hinsdale has “a legal requirement and professional responsibility” to “address her conflicts of interest by removing herself from the Economic Development, Housing, and General Affairs Committee immediately.”

In an email exchange with Bossange prior to the complaints filing, Ram Hinsdale wrote that “someone would have to be both mean spirited and quite poorly read to conclude a major conflict in my work” and said that “what you do for work, who you are married to, what kind of pension you receive, etc. would preclude everyone who serves.”

The group first submitted its complaint to the State Ethics Commission on Feb. 13, alleging Ram Hinsdale violated Vermont Senator Rule 71 that states “no Senator shall be permitted to vote upon any question in which he or she is directly or immediately interested.”

But after several weeks, the group on March 27 issued a press release calling attention to the complaint. Bossange shared the release, as well as correspondence with Ram Hinsdale and other documents, to several media outlets.

The complaint was forwarded to the Senate Ethics Committee on March 15 — both chambers of the Statehouse have their own panels for their members — and prior to the panel’s decision, senators said they could not discuss the complaint or even confirm its existence.

“Ethics committee meetings are confidential so there is not a whole lot that I can share,” Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky said.

Sen. Randy Brockman, meanwhile, said that “members of the Senate Ethics Committee are constrained by Senate Rules from commenting on the committee’s activities.”

The panel’s chair, Brian Campion, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Vermont’s framework over governmental ethics concerns is relatively new and is “actually quite behind,” Christina Sivret, executive director of the Vermont State Ethics Commission, said.

That commission, which functions independent of the Statehouse, was created after a report by the Center for Public Integrity ranked Vermont very low in its accountability processes. The state later created a code of ethics for Senate and House members in 2022.

The Senate Government Operations Committee is currently looking into legislation that would create a code of ethics for municipalities and expand the commission’s jurisdiction over municipalities.

The private nature of the process for reviewing complaints, officials say, is to protect the people submitting complaints — people who may have been sexually harassed, for example. But concerns have been raised over whether the existence of a complaint can be confirmed at all.

“The procedure says it’s all confidential so probably most of the senators would tell you they can’t speak about it because of the procedure,” John Bloomer, secretary of the Senate, said. “I don’t know whether that’s good, bad or indifferent. I mean, I’m just being honest with you on that.”

Currently, a complaint is only made public if the investigating committee opens an investigation after a preliminary review, or if the complainant goes public.

Bloomer says there is nothing barring complainants from going public or going to the press, and the state’s ethics commission puts out a yearly summary of how many complaints they’ve received, as well as how many inquiries to file a complaint they’ve received. None of those are tagged to individual senators, however.

“The idea is not to keep the public from knowing,” Bloomer said, “it’s to make sure that if those who are complaining don’t want it to be made public, it’s not made public by the panel or by the senators who are accused — as a weaponization if nothing else.”

That the existence of the complaints themselves are not made publicly available is of concern, Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, said.

“A more reasonable way forward would be for the commission to make public the existence of the complaint so, at the very least, we all know that a complaint has been filed against a particular legislator,” he said.

But, he noted, that keeping details of a complaint hidden until an investigation is determined necessary might be warranted “in that you don’t want members of the public to be filing meritless complaints against their legislators and abusing the process, which would certainly occur if all the details were revealed.”

Behind the legislation

In crafting Act 47, Ram Hinsdale said her goal was to facilitate infill development, and turn underutilized housing into more efficient spaces that are more affordable for people.

Vacancy rates are stubbornly low and housing prices remain high. Part of the reason for this, experts have said, is the lack of supply in housing units.

“(The complainants) complain about cutting a single-family home into a duplex, or a quadruplex, but 70 percent of Vermonters live in a household of two people or less,” Ram Hinsdale said. “So, the best way to limit development and green space is actually to start looking at underutilized homes.”

The push to relax zoning regulations has been met with stiff resistance from those — like the complainants — concerned with the environmental impact of unchecked development.

The complainants, in their press release, cite the recent conversion of a single-family home in Charlotte in fall 2023 into a quadraplex as “a specific and relevant example of the Hinsdale family making a profit from what Act 47 now allows the family to do.”

Bossange said the ethics committee’s decision “missed the mark.” Perception and appearance of a conflict of interest, or the optics of it all, should be critical to the process.

“If Sen. Ram Hinsdale understood what this major conflict of interest would eventually do to her reputation and the reputations of her colleagues along with the public’s perception of the full senate, she would have wisely requested another assignment, recuse herself from the committee during these discussions, or follow the guidance given by the Vermont State Ethics Commission to clear her name,” Bossange wrote in a perspective for this week’s newspaper. “It’s now understood why she did not, and that dark shadow will follow her political career.”

Hinsdale says she has kept “a very open discussion with my community about the housing work I do. I try to keep that separate from my husband’s line of work, but we share a last name. People have still elected me knowing that.”

State legislators and officials have faced these sorts of criticisms previously, she said. Gov. Phil Scott in 2017 owned a construction company that regularly bid on state transportation contract but sold a part of his stake in the company, while other legislators have recused themselves from certain votes to avoid appearances of a conflict when their partners’ work intersects with legislation.

But, in a citizen legislature, “if everyone did that, there would be no one left to vote,” Hinsdale said. “If everything was investigated because there’s the appearance of a conflict, we wouldn’t be able to function.”