Ethics panel gives green light to Calvert earmark

The House ethics committee cleared the way for Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to pursue a $5.6 million earmark for a transit center one-tenth of a mile away from one property and less than a mile from four other properties that he owns in his district.

The ethics committee found that Calvert’s earmark would not “have a direct and foreseeable effect” on his real estate. The evaluation came in a letter to Calvert dated May 3, about two weeks before he announced a plan to submit all earmarks and potential conflicts of interest to the ethics panel for vetting.

{mosads}He sought the advice about the transit center earmark as the ethics panel was weighing new financial interest disclosure guidelines for earmarks, which it issued March 27.

A Calvert spokesman said he released the letter to reporters to demonstrate there was no impropriety in the proximity of his real estate holdings to his earmark requests. Calvert has faced intense scrutiny over this matter since the local press first reported on some of these deals last year. The FBI subsequently pulled his 2000 to 2005 financial disclosure records.

“[Calvert] is looking to avoid any appearance of impropriety and any additional inquiries later on,” said Calvert’s spokesman Jason Gagnon.

Steve Ellis, a vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, criticized the ethics letter for setting a new precedent by making it nearly impossible for the ethics panel to advise against an earmark.

In its response letter, the committee wrote that it based its evaluation on a number of factors, including “whether the real estate would be affected uniquely or as part of a class belonging to landowners in the area generally.”

In essence, Ellis said, as long as other landowners’ property values stood to increase or did increase along with a congressman’s land, the committee would have no problem with it.

“[Based on the letter], at least as far as property goes, there can never be a conflict,” Ellis said. “They basically … create a roadmap for future members of congress that unless your property is uniquely affected by an earmark, there is no
[improper] financial benefit.”

But William Canfield, a GOP ethics attorney, argued that the letter is consistent with the panel’s past evaluations and that most of the potential conflicts the ethics committee evaluates are subjective in nature. A clear case of a conflict would be obvious only if the earmark were located on land or adjacent to land owned by a lawmaker, or if there were no other landowner in the near vicinity, such as in a rural area where a federal highway is built. If a lawmaker is the only landowner in an area near the highway, then that would be a clearer conflict case.

“Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence has been skewed to objective standards — not subjective standards,” Canfield said.

In Calvert’s letter to the committee, he said the Riverside Transit Agency, the Consolidated Service Agency for western Riverside County, Calif., sought his support for an earmark of $7 million to fund the Corona Transit Center and the Riverside Transit Center in the transportation and housing appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008. (The ethics committee commented only on the $5.6 million earmark request for the Corona Transit Center.) He noted that he has sought and received earmarks for the two centers in the past totaling more than $4 million since fiscal year 2003.

“When completed, the Corona Transit Center will serve as a multi-modal transit center that will greatly assist commuters traveling by rail to Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties,” he wrote, attaching letters of support from cities throughout western Riverside County.

He also listed seven properties and included a map of their proximity to the transit center project.

The ethics committee’s response letter includes the proximity of the seven properties Calvert owns to the transit center, five of which were less than one mile from the project. The other two were 1.2 and 1.7 miles from the center, respectively. One of the properties, a mini-storage facility located 0.5 miles from the center, was valued at $1 million to $5 million. The rest of the properties within one mile of the center were valued between $251,000 to $500,000 and $101,000 to $250,000.