Advisory Opinion No. 98-170

Re: Advisory Opinion Request on behalf of The Rhode Island General Assembly

QUESTION PRESENTED

The petitioners, newly elected and current members of the Rhode Island General Assembly, state elected officials, request an advisory opinion as to whether they may attend and/or accept a free lunch from Brown University in conjunction with a legislative orientation program being presented by the University given that Brown annually receives substantial funding from the State of Rhode Island and employs lobbyists to represent its interests before the General Assembly.

RESPONSE

It is the opinion of the Rhode Island Ethics Commission that the petitioners, newly elected and current members of the Rhode Island General Assembly, state elected officials, 1) may attend a legislative orientation program being presented by Brown University, but 2) may not accept a free lunch from the University in conjunction with that program. Commission Regulation 36-14-5009 provides that no person subject to the Code of Ethics shall accept a gift or other thing of economic value, including a meal, from an “interested person.” Brown University, which receives substantial annual funding from the State of Rhode Island, primarily related to its medical school, and which employs at least two lobbyists to represent its interests before the General Assembly, is an “interested person.” Therefore, members of the General Assembly may not accept anything of economic value from Brown University unless it falls within one of Regulation 36-14-5009’s specific exceptions. The program itself constitutes “services to assist an official or employee in the performance of official duties and responsibilities,” which are excepted under subsection 36-14-5009(a)(1)(b). The free lunch, however, does not fall within any of the exceptions and, therefore, may not be accepted by any members of the General Assembly.

Obviously, the members of the General Assembly may attend all or part of the orientation being offered by Brown. As for the lunch, a variety of options are available to the members of the General Assembly. First, they could simply pay for the lunch themselves. Second, the State could pay for it. The petitioner represents that the General Assembly has joined with Brown University to present the one-day institute. Educational programs for state employees and officials routinely are paid for with state funds. The orientation program described here, and the value ascribed to it, clearly would satisfy any standard for designating state funds to pay for the meal. Finally, in initial conversations leading up to this request for an advisory opinion, one of the Brown representatives involved with the program advised that the initiation program was modeled on a similar program run by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics for newly-elected members of Congress. Harvard’s program, it turns out, is not financed with University money. Rather, the Institute uses proceeds from the John F. Kennedy Library and private contributions to pay all expenses. For future reference, that is yet another alternative that would be available to Brown and the members of the General Assembly.

Code Citations:

36-14-5009

Related Advisory Opinions:

98-121

Keywords:

Gifts