CICCONE

PROVIDENCE — Operation Clean Government, the citizen group, yesterday filed an ethics complaint against state senator and union official Frank A. Ciccone III.

The complaint, which the group said it filed yesterday afternoon, concerns Ciccone’s role with the Laborers’ International Union, where he is business manager of Local 808 and a field representative with the Rhode Island Laborers’ District Council.

Arthur C. “Chuck” Barton III, the group’s president, who signed the complaint, said Ciccone violated the ethics rules in three ways:

•By co-sponsoring and voting for legislation that would financially benefit his union by increasing the amount that taxpayers pay for mediation in disputes between municipal employers and public employee unions.

•Participating in hearings by the Senate Committee on Government Oversight, where Ciccone is the vice chairman, on the use of temporary staffing services to fill state jobs. Ciccone’s union represents state employees, Barton said. If state jobs are filled by permanent employees rather than temporary ones, he said, Ciccone’s union would benefit “by having increased dues arising from representation of the additional workers.”

•Failing to disclose his employers and what positions he holds with the labor organizations he works for in his annual financial disclosure statements for the last two years. Barton’s complaint says those omissions in Ciccone’s 2005 and 2006 filings conceal Ciccone’s conflicts of interest and are themselves violations of the Code of Ethics. The financial disclosure statements are intended to allow citizens to detect conflicts of interest among public officials.

The Ethics Commission didn’t confirm or deny that the complaint was filed. The commission staff won’t confirm the existence of a complaint until it has been accepted, and gives itself up to three days to confirm basic information, for example, that it has been signed and notarized and that it names an official subject to the Code of Ethics.

Ciccone, a Providence Democrat, couldn’t be reached late yesterday. He is also one focus in a dispute between Republican Governor Carcieri and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly. The Senate Oversight Committee is poking into the administration’s use of temporary employment services to fill state jobs, sometimes at great expense, and the administration has been snarling back.

Barton’s complaint attacks the legitimacy of Ciccone’s participation in that legislative foray. Carcieri, meanwhile, has accused Ciccone of being involved in extending a record-keeping contract for the state court system, where Ciccone worked at the time, without bidding.

The bill Barton questioned passed the Senate May 2 and is before the House Finance Committee. It would require the state to pay up to $15,000, rather than the present $5,000, toward the cost of mediation to settle labor disputes between unions and municipal governments. If the costs exceeded $15,000, the expenses would be split between the union and the school committee.

That bill, Barton said, “advanced a very specific benefit” to Ciccone’s union, by shifting mediation expenses from the union to the taxpayer.

Barton, like Carcieri a Republican, said that Ciccone’s situation is similar to those that prompted Operation Clean Government to file ethics complaints against ex-state Senators John Celona and William Irons, accusing them of advancing legislation on behalf of companies that paid them fees or other benefits.

“Senator Ciccone is putting himself in a position where it is impossible to tell whether he is acting in the public interest or in the interest of his employer,” Barton said in a statement accompanying his complaint.

Barton said he suspects there are other legislators who work for unions and who have been supporting legislation that benefits their employers.

“I suspect there are,” he said. “We’ve been looking.”

blandis@projo.com