After coming under intense criticism from half the D.C. Council, the D.C. GOP, a past D.C. Chamber of Commerce president, and the editor of the Washington Business Journal, Vincent Orange still maintains there is “no conflict” between his job as an At-large D.C. Councilmember who chairs the business committee and his newly announced position as the head of an industry lobbying group.

“As you and I sit here there is no conflict,” Orange said on the Kojo Nnamdi Show this afternoon. “I have been advised by the board of ethics and our own counsel that there is no outright prohibition against me holding this job.”

Indeed, councilmembers (who earn nearly $135,000 a year) are allowed to have second jobs, and Orange cited Jack Evans’ position at a law firm and Mary Cheh’s gig as a law professor as current examples. “They want to pick and choose” who can have outside jobs, he argued.

But it is a flagrant stretch to equate those positions with heading up a major industry group that is currently fighting several pieces of legislation on the Council’s docket—and before Orange’s own committee.

Even if the arrangement is entirely legal, there’s still a major of appearance of impropriety that Orange tacitly acknowledged. “The optics are going to be addressed,” he told Nnamdi. “We will have a very workable solution when we return to the council [after the summer recess]. This is extremely short term.”

That “solution,” he said, will likely include requesting that Chairman Phil Mendelson absorb the Committee on Business, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs into the Committee of the Whole. “It will be totally under his control and I would be divorced from that.”

Orange’s job as councilmember ends in January, while he steps into the Chamber role on August 15. He noted that the Council doesn’t return to regulatory business until the summer recess ends, so “we have until September 20th to keep the dialogue going.”

He also downplayed his role at the Chamber of Commerce, saying lawyers for the industry group handle most of the lobbying and that he instead will be responsible for increasing membership and the annual gala.

When pressed about past opposition to Councilmembers taking outside jobs—he’s even sponsored legislation to end the practice—Orange insisted that his actions don’t represent a change of opinion.

“Maybe we can have, once and for all, a very objective discussion about whether councilmembers should have outside jobs,” he said. If another lawmaker introduced legislation to ban them, Orange said, he would vote for it.

Until then, though, he’s keeping both paychecks.