PUBLIC DISCLOSURE STATEMENTS
Defined Terms
The following terms are used in the Disclosure Statement, including the Schedules, with the meaning set forth below. (These definitions conform to those in the Ethics Ordinance but include additional ones).
- Attributable: See under Interest.
- Business: The engagement in commerce, whether for profit or not for profit.
- Doing business with the Town means providing goods or services to the Town or responding to requests for proposals or invitations to submit a bid to the Town.
- Close Relative: Any of the covered person’s parents, spouse, domestic partner, siblings, and children.
- Confidential Information: Any information that is disclosed or made available or accessible to the covered person, regardless in whatever way or form, on condition of confidentiality or under circumstances clearly requiring confidentiality, unless such information enters the public domain without fault of the covered person.
- Contingent Compensation: Compensation for the representation of another person that is dependent on the success of the representation.
- Covered Person: A person who is required by the Town’s Ethics Ordinance to submit public disclosure statements.
- Earned Income: Wages, salaries, bonuses, professional fees, tips, compensation that results from the covered person’s personal labor or services, strike benefits, long-term disability benefits received prior to the minimum retirement age, net earnings from self-employment or from a business by its owner or operator, and any other receipts of money that is deemed earned income under the Internal Revenue Code. Earned income does not include interest, dividends, retirement income, social security benefits, unemployment benefits, alimony, or child support.
- Entity: A person, a company regardless of legal form, or a government or government instrumentality.
- Interest: A legal or equitable ownership right that is held wholly or partly, jointly, or severally, directly, or indirectly, by the covered person, including an interest that is subject to an encumbrance or condition.
- Interest does not include:
o an interest held in the capacity of agent, custodian, fiduciary, personal representative, or trustee, unless such holder also has an interest of its own in the object,
o an interest in a deposit in a financial institution, in an insurance or endowment policy, or in an annuity contract,
o a trust fund, or a trust that forms part of a pension or profit-sharing plan which (a) has more than 25 participants and (b) is a qualified trust or college savings plan under the Internal Revenue Code, or
o a mutual fund that is publicly traded on a national scale, or an exchange traded fund, unless the fund is composed primarily of holdings of stock or other interests in a specific economic sector or geographical area that is regulated by the Town.
- The following interests are attributable to a covered person:
- an interest of a close relative in which the covered person (or an entity in which the covered person held a greater than 50% interest) held a greater than 50% interest, or
- an interest held by
- (A) a business entity in which the covered person held a 10% or greater interest, or
- (B) a business entity described in clause (A) above through which the covered person or the close relative) indirectly held an interest in other entities.
- NOTE: Whenever the existence of a business entity attributable to the covered person is disclosed, the covered person may be contacted by a representative of the Town to explore whether such indirect holdings must be disclosed in detail under the applicable State disclosure law.
- Quasi-governmental Entity: An entity created by State statute that performs a public function and is supported in whole or in part by the State but is managed privately.