In this week's New York Times Sunday Review section, Stephanie Coontz wrote about "social nostalgia," that is, nostalgia about the way society used to be. She cites a study of men with difficult childhoods, done by the psychologist John Snarey, which I assume is discussed in Snarey's 1993 book, How Fathers Care for the Next Generation (Harvard Univ. Press).

Snarey's study shows that some men replicate the problems in their relationships with their children, while others chart a different course. What the new course charters do is neither idealize their fathers, nor focus on their shortcomings. Instead, they place their fathers' failures in context, looking at them with "a sense of sadness for and understanding of the conditions under which their own fathers had functioned." They use their memories to avoid bad behavior rather than as an excuse for engaging in it.

Local government officials are like fathers to young officials and employees who learn the ropes from them. If the government's ethics environment is poor, young officials experience intimidation, secrecy, demands for loyalty, and disdain for those on the outside, better known as the residents of the community. And in most cases, these young officials continue the ethics environment. They might have hated the intimidation, resented the feeling that their loyalty was not returned, and had trouble feeling disdain, but they found they could attain power by intimidating others and demanding their loyalty, or keep clear of the whole thing by going along and keeping quiet, thereby enabling the behavior they resented.

Using old tactics to get and keep power is especially enticing to new groups who are finally getting a chance. The tactics might have been used against them in the past, but they worked, and working is what counts, especially since all that intimidation, demand for loyalty, and requirement of secrecy was intended to keep some pretty lucrative transactions from being discovered.

This is old news, of course. What I want to stress is that the way to deal successfully with past misconduct is the same in government as it is with being a father oneself. Looking at local government leaders not with fear or anger, but with sadness and understanding, with an appreciation of the situational pressures on them, is the best way to go about changing the situational pressures and discussing the past in a way that leads to a new future, rather than the same old thing.

On April 30, the D.C. ethics board reached a settlement with a council member (attached; see below), whereby he was admonished for having "used the prestige of his office or his public position for the private gain" of a company by influencing health department personnel to leave the site of the business without issuing a notice of closure, allowing the business to continue to operate for several more hours.

Some important issues are raised in this matter, including (1) the line between constituent services and preferential treatment, (2) the appropriateness of a preferential treatment provision, (3) interventions of legislators and their staff in administrative matters; and (4) an ethics board's role in limiting or prohibiting constituent services.

In January, I wrote a blog post about the District of Columbia ethics board's first public forum seeking recommendations for ethics reform. On April 17, the ethics board published a report that makes recommendations for improvements to the city's ethics program (attached; see below).

Of the five recommendations I made in my testimony to the D.C. board, only one of them appears in the recommendations. Our principal difference is that the board does not appear to agree with my argument that changes to ethics provisions should be left until all the essential elements of a government ethics program are in place. The ethics board's response to this is that, with respect to "structural and compositional changes to its makeup," it will "reserve any such comment and potential recommendations for future reports." That is, it will take the opposite approach to what I recommend.

“The real issue is who’s giving money and real transparency. We’re going to do this in a way that’s above board. We’re each going to be contributing our ethical and moral standards that we have been living our lives by.”

—New Haven mayoral candidate Matthew Nemerson on why he's not going to participate in the New Haven Democracy Fund, one of the few municipal public campaign financing programs in the U.S. He says that instead he will make campaign contributions public within 48 hours of receipt (candidates participating in the Democracy Fund enter their contributions into the state's database, and they must be made public at least monthly during the campagn, and are searchable).

What is fascinating about this quote is that the usual personal moral standard line is used here with respect to public financing, as if we learn from our family and our house of worship whether it is more ethical to be quickly transparent (and how much, since we don't know if Nemerson will actually tell the public who works for a contractor, developer, lobbying firm, etc.) or to accept contribution and spending limits, as well as other restrictions that are part and parcel of a public financing program. For the record, I administered the program from its inception until last July. This quote is from a New Haven Independent article from a week ago.

Here are some more quotes from Nemerson, from a debate sponsored by Yale Democrats, taken from an Independent article from this week:

It's here at last:  the first government ethics app (at least that I know of). According to a Capitol Alert post on the Sacramento Bee website yesterday,  California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) has a free smartphone app called Gift Tracker (first for Android, and soon for Apple) to let officials (state only, it appears) record in real time gifts received from restricted sources.

FPPC Enforcement Division Chief Gary Winuk is quoted as saying, "If you're at an event, if you're at a meeting, if you're giving a speech, if you're in a reception, you can just log in what the gift is." Then you export the log into a spreadsheet to attach to your annual disclosure statement (no, it doesn't appear to be a spreadsheet searchable by the public).

The app also allows officials to contact gift sources via text message, e-mail, or telephone, to let them know what they plan to report. Thus, an official can contact a reception host to let it know what she ate and drank at the reception. This way the official and the reception host are on the same page, even if no one will see the page for quite some time.

The app even helps you keep track of your aggregate gifts from a particular source, so you won't go over the $440 annual limit. The question is, can it tell you the fair market value of a sushi sampler, a glass of the best champagne, or the drafting of a bill?

According to a column in today's New York Times and a visit to the New York City Business Integrity Commission's (BIC) website, the BIC provides three easy lessons in how not to run an oversight commission. The BIC has jurisdiction over the private waste carting industry, businesses operating in the city's public wholesale markets, and the shipboard gambling industry. Its goal is to "preserve a healthy and competitive environment in [these] industries in NYC through a unique and comprehensive merger of law enforcement tactics and regulatory oversight."

In his column, Michael Powell asserts that, although the BIC is meant to create a competitive environment in the industries it oversees, at the BIC itself "no-bid, zero-transparency contracts seem distressingly common." According to the most recent former BIC administrator, there is “no requirement at the commission that [a contract] go out for competitive bid. There’s an internal review process.”