Blogs

In a recent blog post, I listed the suits filed by Maricopa County's sheriff Joe Arpaio and county attorney Andrew Thomas against other county officials during the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws conference right in the heart of Maricopa County.

Well, it got worse. On the last day of the conference, according to...

The ethics commission for the largest American city, and the only one with a truly appropriate title — New York City's Conflicts of Interest Board — is appointed by the city's extremely strong mayor, with council approval.

If this old and highly respected EC were to be made independent of the administration it oversees, it would send an important message to the rest of the country's local...

Here's a tough call. It's a few weeks before a primary election, and you (a local ethics commission member or staff member) learn that a candidate has violated an ethics code provision, and hidden it via a false disclosure. Do you act or do you sit on your hands until after the election?

Often this sort of problem arises when a complaint is filed by an opposing candidate or party member, that is, when the filing is politically motivated. But what should an EC do when there is no...

I talk a lot about the importance of independent ethics commissions. But independence is not always a good thing for local government boards and commissions. Independence without oversight, transparency, and independent ethics enforcement easily turns into someone's fiefdom.

According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, Detroit's two...

End runs around ethics and campaign finance laws are one of my favorite topics to write about. A sizeable percentage of the creative energies of government officials and their attorneys seems to go into coming up with ways of getting around these laws. And then arguing that such laws are of little value since you can't plug loopholes as fast as they can invent them.

The Center for Governmental Studies in California has just...

Standard of proof is a big issue in ethics enforcement, as it is in any enforcement. A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post on the mishmash of standards of proof in local ethics codes and in the codes of states that have jurisdiction over local government ethics. In many codes there is no stated standard or a worthlessly ambiguous standard. In others, the standard is clear, but a serious obstacle to enforcement...