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According to an article in this week's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a rule prohibiting Georgia state employees from accepting gifts over $25 is not being enforced. At all.

How does the paper know these gifts are being made? Because lobbyists have to disclose their spending on state employees as well as on legislators (who are not restricted from taking such gifts). Governor...

Update: November 11, 2009 (see below)

Is there any worse way to skirt government ethics rules and misuse public money and position than via a charitable organization? And yet it happens again and again. This time it happened in Baltimore, according to the results of an extensive investigation by the Baltimore Sun.

This week, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox announced a "toolbox" for local governments to create local ethics policies. Local government ethics is already governed by state statutes, but local governments can apparently supplement these rules with local laws and ethics boards. The toolbox consists of a ...

Here are two interesting local government ethics case studies from matters in the news this week.

A Job Can Effectively Be a Gift
According to an article in the Spokesman-Review, a Spokane council member requested an advisory opinion from the city's ethics committee after his successful push to change city regulations to allow bus bench...

I've talked about legal defense funds in the past as a way to accept large gifts from those doing business with a local government, but I referred, tangentially, to only one local government legal defense fund, that of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. So I did some research and came up with a few other examples, which are worth knowing about if the...

Possibly the most valuable annual local government ethics resource was published this morning:  Patricia Salkin's 2009 Ethical Considerations in Land Use, a 28-page summary of reported cases and opinions on ethics matters in land use situations. The 2008 edition focused on wind farm ethics in New York (also see my two blog posts on this topic:...