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Tallahassee takes a compliance approach to ethics. Its ethics code is aspirational, based on core values. Its ethics training employs a Character First approach. Conflicts of interest are only a small portion of a program that ranges from personnel and transparency issues to harassment, discrimination, and fraud.

This is not the sort of ethics program usually discussed in this blog, because it is not what is...

Update: January 4, 2010 (see below)

On December 15, Chicago published a Compliance and Integrity Survey that its Office of Compliance commissioned from the...

In three cities this week, top officials showed the ability to get away with unethical behavior, but not the ability to distinguish law from ethics.

It's only a month ago that a federal court in California rejected a PAC's attempt to prevent the Los Angeles ethics commission from enforcing contribution limits in the city's ethics laws. And yet, according to an article in the San...

Update: December 30, 2009

Two weeks ago, I welcomed the new Palm Beach County ethics codes. What I didn't realize is how much of the county's government isn't covered by the codes, including other elected officials (and their offices) such as the sheriff, the School Board, the tax collector, the county clerk, the property appraiser, and the supervisor of...

This year, the Rhode Island ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over local governments, has been bouncing around the issue of conflicts of interest relating to local officials' involvement in  negotiations with a union, where they or their spouse is a member of a different local union that shares the same umbrella union and, often, the same negotiators and some of the same funds. The public statements on this issue, from representatives of unions and good government organizations, and the...