The reason Bill Vandivort didn’t show up to defend his ethics complaint against Robin Norcross at last week’s hearing, he says in an e-mail to Back Talk, is because his presence "seemed irrelevant", given that the Ethics Advisory Commission panel at the preliminary hearing had pursued the complaint based on a different section of the Code of Ethics than the one he referenced.

Vandivort says he filed a complaint that alleged three violations of ethics (described in the previous post), and the committee reviewing his complaint threw all three charges out. While deciding on those three charges, however, Vandivort says the three commission members at the preliminary hearing decided that one of his complaints might have "just cause" to pursue, based on a section of the ethics code Vandivort says he didn’t use in his original complaint. That’s the complaint the commission pushed forward and the one that Norcross showed up to defend against last week.

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So Vandivort says any statement he made "would have been speculation on the reasoning of the preliminary panel members. … Only the preliminary panel members knew their reasoning for the ‘just cause’ finding," and Vandivort says he couldn’t explore the new basis for the complaint since the code doesn’t allow discussion with Ethics Advisory Commission members outside of a hearing. (He wasn’t at the preliminary hearing to ask about their decision.)

Bottom line: Since the final complaint was different from what he submitted, Vandivort says he didn’t see any need to attend. He also questioned  why the three preliminary panel members originally voted for "just cause" and then "the same commissioners voted that the complaint was not supported. One wonders?"

Vandivort gave one final reason why he didn’t attend the hearing: "Lake Highlands is a community divided. We have lived here for over 30 years — the failure of elected leadership has our community on the brink. Did not seem to be a prudent action to attend the hearing and add ‘fuel’ to the ‘raging inferno.’"