Reached last night, Betsy Huber said the settlement struck down her previous method of keeping herself out of decisions related to her husband's job.
She said that, at the beginning of each year she has been in office, the board had approved a motion whose text recused her from voting on her husband's work.
But that apparently backfired, because officials did not sever Henry Huber's salary from the overall budget, which she voted on regularly.
"I thought I was doing the right thing all these years, by the supervisors adopting a motion stating I would not approve bills for payment to my husband as zoning officer," Betsy Huber said. "Someone filed a complaint with the Ethics Commission. That's when I found out the motion was not sufficient to remove me from a conflict of interest."
Supervisors Chairman James E. Gorman could not be reached for comment.
Huber was apparently warned not to make those votes 12 years ago.
In a 1992 nonbinding opinion, the Ethics Commission's chief lawyer, Vince Dopkin, told her not to vote on anything relating to her husband.
But she apparently did.
Betsy Huber voted each year between 1998 and 2003 to reappoint her husband as zoning officer and voted to set his salary, the commission said.
"But for the fact that Huber was a supervisor, she would not have been in a position to take various actions as to the reappointments of her spouse as zoning officer . . . and participate in the bill approval processes which included township employee wages," the commission said in its ruling.
Henry Huber worked part-time and was paid $26,535 over that five-year period. He became zoning officer in 1987, years before his wife's election.
In another Chester County ruling, the commission said that Thornbury Township Supervisor Barbara Iacovelli will pay $500 to settle an allegation that she improperly voted in July 2001 to have the township install curbing in her development and on her property.
