Scarborough Town Council Chairman Steve Ross told the public last week that he had worked for the contractor who installed the town’s new turf field at the high school.

After voting on the award of the bid for the new turf field to Sports Turf International, the company negotiated a contract with Ross to do surveying for the track around the field for $95 an hour.

If benefiting financially from a project an elected official has voted on isn’t against the rules, it should be.

It doesn’t matter whether Ross’s intentions were good or bad in this instance. He may have had nothing but the best of intentions – making sure Scarborough runners had the best track possible. A former track coach, Ross no doubt wanted to leave future teams with a good track.

The problem is elected officials shouldn’t be able to benefit financially from projects they vote on because it could affect the way they vote. In other words, when elected officials accept money from someone who has benefited from a vote, it calls into question whose behalf they are acting on – the public’s or their own. Unfortunately, not everyone can be trusted to do the right thing.

What Ross did might not have met the legal definition of a conflict of interest. That definition requires that an elected official have at least 10 percent interest in a company that would benefit from a vote, according to Michael Starn of the Maine Municipal Association.

Ross doesn’t have an interest in Sports Turf International. However, councilors would certainly want to abstain from voting on something that would affect a company that employs them – companies that could be responsible for up to 100 percent of the income of elected officials. Therefore, it would seem, councilors wouldn’t want to vote on a bid and go to work for the company a couple months later.

The work Ross did for Sports Turf International became public because of a memo issued last week by Norm Justice, the school facilities manager for Scarborough schools. The working relationship was one of several concerns Justice raised in the memo.

Last week, when a reporter for the Current asked Eric Lenardson, the owner of Sports Turf International and a Scarborough resident, whether Ross had been paid to do work for his company, he said the councilor was “just helping out.” (Ross declined to comment until the council meeting, when he announced that he did indeed have a contract to do work of Sports Turf International.) In explanation of his previous response, Lenardson said this week that he was talking about the turf field, not the track, which he apparently considers to be a completely separate project.

The track and the turf field are one project, regardless of whether they are separate line items in the budget. Sports Turf International is one company, and Ross is one councilor. That’s why Ross came clean about the whole affair at the council meeting last week, albeit as he argued that there was no conflict of interest.

Ross has had a distinguished career as a councilor in Scarborough. This should not tarnish that, but he should not accept any money he would be paid for this project. It’s simply inappropriate, and would set a bad example for future councilors. Accepting money for projects like these should be against the rules.

Brendan Moran, editor