What is the best way to prevent high-level officials from participating in matters involving departments or agencies where their close family members are employed, without doing this unreasonably, that is, excluding situations where the family members have no influence and will receive no benefits?

This is the question that has been raised in Baltimore by council members, particularly the council president who, according to an article in yesterday's Baltimore Sun, says he "abstains from about 20 percent of votes before the Board of Estimates, the city's spending panel, because he has four family members who work in city government:  a daughter who is a teacher in the city's Head Start program; a brother who is a laborer working for the Department of Public Works; a sister who works as a customer service representative in the Mayor's Office of Information Technology; and a brother who works in human resources in the city housing department."

“It’s much to-do about not much. I’m trying to run a city, and you’re worried about people’s relationships?” These are the words of Mount Vernon, NY mayor Ernest Davis, who is the subject of IRS and FBI investigations, and now an investigation by the city's ethics board, according to an article in Wednesday's Journal News.

Dealing responsibly with relationships is what government ethics all about. You can't deal responsibly with them unless you acknowledge them, and worry about them a little.

The Los Angeles mayoral race has unearthed some conflict of interest allegations that are worth a look. There are three interesting issues. One, how much stock ownership in a public company is required to give rise to a conflict? Two, what about ownership of a competitor? And three, what if you don't know a public company whose stock you own is involved in a matter before you?

According to an article in Los Angeles Times last week, one mayoral candidate accused another of having voted, as a council member, on a legal settlement that allowed Clear Channel Outdoor to convert hundreds of billboards to a digital format.

I have done a poor job in this blog covering administrative ethics, that is, the field of study involving the professional conduct of public administrators. Writers on administrative ethics have done a poor job of covering government ethics, that is, the field of study involving conflicts of interest. Although the two fields overlap, they exist in mostly separate worlds.  For example, rarely does an administrative ethics professor show up at a Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) conference, and my work (among others') has been totally ignored by administrative ethics professors.

Government ethics is unusual in having very limited representation in academia. Instead, it is taught by professors who consider it essentially a small corner of their field, which is administrative ethics. And to the extent government ethics courses are taught, they deal primarily with the federal government, even though most public administrators work in state and local governments and the federal ethics program does not provide a good example for other levels.

I find this state of affairs disheartening. That is why I was excited to learn that, in the second edition of his book Ethics Management for Public Administrators: Leading and Building Organizations of Integrity (M.E. Sharpe, 2012), Donald C. Menzel added a new chapter, "Local Government Ethics Management in Action."

But what I found in the book was hostility to conflict of interest programs. My goal in this series of blog posts is to try to understand this hostility, and to propose that the disciplines respect and responsibly critique each other, rather than ignoring and, occasionally, showing hostility to each other. What we need is a dialogue and mutual respect.

[Note: I have made changes throughout this blog post, based on a February 25 e-mail message from the COG executive director]

It should feel good when a pet idea of yours becomes a reality. My pet idea is the regional ethics program, whose biggest successes have been of the countywide variety, such as Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County, FL (there is also a Broward County program, but it is run by an inspector general). There are a few regional ethics commissions in Kentucky, and one in Northwest Indiana, but they don't really have ethics programs.

I'm sad to say that I do not feel good about the creation of the Southeastern Connecticut Council of Governments Regional Ethics Commission.

One good thing about it is that it was formed in a different manner than the others. It was formed by a council of governments (COG), which is the body by which local governments in Connecticut cooperate in such areas as conservation, development, transportation, and emergency management. The COG in southeastern CT consists of 20 cities, towns, and boroughs, with a total population of around 250,000. No county is involved, because Connecticut has no county governments.

Some very interesting issues arise out of a past (and present) conflict situation that has become an issue in this week's mayoral primary in the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, KS ("UG").

The conflict situation appears simple at first glance, but it is not. In 2007, a UG commissioner became the paid executive director of the Argentine Neighborhood Development Association ("ANDA"), a nonprofit Community Development Corporation and Community Housing Development Organization that has received funds from the UG. The executive director was paid, at least partially, out of those funds.