In The News 27 June 2014

Pepper: Ohio Attorney General must lead effort to clean up 'pay-to-play' in Ohio

By
-

David Pepper, Democratic nominee for Ohio Attorney General, has announced a plan to make the Attorney General’s Office a leading force in cleaning up state and local government in Ohio.

These initiatives come after incidents of ethically questionable behavior by state and local elected officials and senior state employees.

"The Attorney General’s Office can help put an end to the cycle of pay-to-play corruption, recover lost or wasted taxpayer dollars, and improve Ohioans’ faith that government truly works for them," Pepper said. "But it starts with an Attorney General’s Office that is itself a model of public integrity."

Pepper will create new Public Integrity and Taxpayer Protection Units in the Attorney General’s Office to receive complaints, conduct investigations, assist with special prosecutions, and recover taxpayer money lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.

To assist state agencies and local governments, Pepper will create model policies that can be adopted to assure citizens that government is working in an ethical and transparent way.

Pepper will also dramatically improve the integrity of the Attorney General’s Office. He will end pay-to-play awarding of legal work, ensuring lucrative state contracts are awarded on the basis of merit, not campaign donations.

Pepper will create an online database of who does business with the office and what cases the office is involved with nationally. Finally, Pepper will improve hiring practices for senior staff to ensure high quality staff, not cronies, are chosen.

Recently, Ohio has seen both the Attorney General and State Treasurer caught up in pay-to-play schemes involving special favors and lucrative state contracts for major campaign donors.

Senior aides to the Lieutenant Governor were forced to resign after routinely not showing up to work. Operators of failing charter schools owe the state $31 million, nearly all of which the Attorney General has failed to collect.

Read Pepper’s full plan at http://davidpepper.com/cleanupohio/

[[In-content Ad]]

Add new comment

This is not for publication.
This is not for publication.
About text formats

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
Article comments are not posted immediately to the Web site. Each submission must be approved by the Web site editor, who may edit content for appropriateness. There may be a delay of 24-48 hours for any submission while the web site editor reviews and approves it. Note: All information on this form is required. Your telephone number and email address is for our use only, and will not be attached to your comment.
CAPTCHA This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions. Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.