According to a recent article in the Daily Sentinel, a Mesa County (CO) Commissioner says that he is running for re-election on his energy-industry experience (he is a principal of an energy services company that contracts with local oil and gas companies). Energy appears to be a principal industry in Mesa County, and one that often comes before the County Commission.

This commissioner's opponent is accusing the commissioner of ignoring conflicts of interest by voting on energy-industry matters involving companies the commissioner's firm has done business with. (Click here for a letter responding to the opponent's accusation.)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has come up with a new defense of a potential conflict of interest: "I'm investing in something I believe in."

What she was investing in, as "part of an entrepreneurial package," as she said on yesterday's Meet the Press, according to a partial transcript, was T. Boone Pickens' Clean Energy Fuels Corp., which despite Pickens' emphasis on wind power, also invests in using natural gas instead of gasoline for transportation, an important goal for Pelosi.

I'd like to follow up on what I said at the end of yesterday's blog entry, about jurisdictions that make ethics violations criminal and require a showing of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and a showing of intentionality or recklessness or negligence. Here is the penalty provision in the Arizona Conduct of Office chapter, which applies equally to local governments (to see the entire chapter, click here and scroll down to Chapter 3):

A conflict controversy in Benson, Arizona shows how important participation can be where there is a conflict, even when an official does not vote. According to an article in the San Pedro Valley News-Sun, the mayor was in escrow to purchase property for which he was seeking to (and successfully did) reduce the time (from six to two months) for rezoning from residential to business. After doing this, he did not vote on the matter. He was also involved in annexing land to the city that he was in the midst of purchasing (the council didn't vote on this), and in participating in plan reviews involving a building he was bidding on ("The investigation revealed that staff felt intimidated by Mayor Fenn, resulting in changes in the plan review of this project.")

Local election officials have been put in a bind since the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed by Congress in 2002. Federal and state requirements limit their control over voting processes, and there have been many problems with the companies that provide voting equipment and services. Besides the pains of dealing with these companies from a position of weakness, the biggest problem is accountability and confidence in the voting process. A Zogby poll done in August 2006 found that over 2.5 million non-registered citizens do not bother to register to vote because they do not trust the vote-counting processes and procedures.

Voters Unite has just published a study examining these problems, and showing how some local governments have successfully dealt with them. It's worth a look from local election officials and those who feel their local government's officials are not doing enough.

Campaign contributions are not generally considered to be bribes, but the perception of large campaign contributions from local government contractors is often that they are payments for contracts past or future, what is known in the government ethics business as "pay-to-play."

For this reason, state and local governments have taken a variety of approaches toward dealing with this perception. The most common response is disclosure, for example, requiring local government contractors to disclose their status when they give a contribution above a certain amount. The most extreme response is to prevent contractors from making contributions at all, as is more often done with lobbyists.

New York City has taken a new approach, in conjunction with its public financing program, which, as I said in an earlier blog entry, has caught the attention of James Bopp, the nation's leading bringer of suits against public campaign financing programs, according to an article in the New York Sun.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

Tomorrow, I am going to Guantanamo Bay. To get there, I have to drive through Guantanamo Bay.

How could that be? For the same reason that you might be sitting in Guantanamo Bay as you read this:  because innocent people are being held, and mistreated, in long-term detention all over the United States, including in local government facilities (see map).

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Ted Stevens has been indicted for falsely reporting over $250,000 in services he received from an oil company that renovated his home. He denies the charges.

Whether or not he's guilty of these charges, he is certainly guilty of a conflict of interest that plagues politicians at all levels of government:  identifying himself with his constituency, and abusing his power to benefit his constituents, to his own benefit, at the expense of others whose representatives lack that power.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

In a recent blog entry, I looked at how a couple of Connecticut towns are using the Internet to get citizen feedback and provide transparency. But some cities have gone much further, according to a syndicated column by Neal Peirce.

Cities and their citizens are starting to make use of what is known as Web 2.0, the interactive, collaborative aspects of the Internet. Baltimore and Washington, D.C. have taken the lead. Washington's efforts have been led by chief technology officer Vivek Kundra, born in India, raised in Tanzania, and someone who seems to have the belief in government service and citizen participation that immigrants often feel more strongly. Washington's city government has instituted what it calls a Citywide Data Warehouse, which pulls together data, by ward, on crime, service requests, housing complaints, etc, and provides 215 real-time data feeds for anyone to work with.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

The passing of new ethics code provisions in Anoka, MN (pop. 18,000) provides a fine case study of how to try to pass off useless ethics code reform as something valuable.

According to an article in the Anoka County Union, it appears the city council has a public confidence problem. The council's response was to quickly pass some rudimentary ethics code changes, including one that requires each board and commission to decide among its members, with advice from the city attorney, how to handle a possible conflict raised by a member about himself or herself, something that should go without saying.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.