The East Hartford Gazette

Kinghorn Affair Is Disgrace To Town
The Kinghorn affair is a disgrace to East Hartford.

Anyone with the slightest sense of what is proper knows that an electrical inspector should not run, or have an important interest in, a firm whose work he inspects. Especially a firm which competes with others whose work he inspects. This is like a judge trying cases before himself.

Yet it took an out-of-town electrician with more courage than his fellow contractors to bring out the situation so that action was taken.

If town officials had no inkling that Inspector David Kinghorn had an interest in the Hometown Electric Co., then one might wonder what else they don't know.

It is more likely that they did know and just didn't act. The speed with which Mr. Kinghorn was temporarily suspended a week ago last Friday, immediately after copies of a complaining letter from Windsor contractor William Edenbo arrived, indicates that the town government knew there was something to the charges.

Besides that, William C. Caplin, then town Republican chairman, had publicly accused Mr. Kinghorn of having an interest in Hometown Electric back in 1957. Mr. Caplin did not produce witnesses to force the issue from the outside. His statements should have been the tipoff for the town government to look into the question itself.

But Mr. Caplin, of course, was in the opposite party. Mr. Kinghorn was one of the club; he gave $100 to the Democrats in the 1957 political campaign and the same amount in 1958.

So things just slid. If efforts were made to make Mr. Kinghorn give up one or the other of his dual roles, they were feeble at best. It is hard to believe that his employers could not have accomplished by themselves what copies of a single letter did last week.

So now Mr. Kinghorn is allowed to stay, providing he gets rid of his interest in Hometown Electric. In announcing its decision, the Building Commission placed stress on the fact that Mr. Edenbo did not prove his strongest charge, that Mr. Kinghorn had "coerced" firms to do business with Hometown Electric. Presumably the commission would have fired him if this had been proven.

Should he have been fired anyway, on grounds of the dual interest, with all its possibilities of coercion? In most communities, yes. In a town whose government apparently had tolerated the situation for a long time, it would have been an injustice.

You cannot stand by and watch the children eat the cookies and then spank them for it.

But you can lay down the law for the future. On paper, the town can require that no employees who purchase, or inspect, or regulate, hold outside positions without submitting a full description of the outside job and obtaining permission of the Town Council, in open meeting.

In practice, the town government can realize that wrong is wrong; that if you wink at it or don't guard against it, it will come home to roost.