Garbage is the principal regular point of contact between individuals and their local government. If people are happy with their garbage pickup, they are likely to be happy with their local government. For this reason, smart high-level local government officials make sure that garbage pickup is done well.

In Chicago, the members of the board of aldermen wanted to be given credit for garbage pickup. They also wanted to use it as a way to provide their supporters with jobs. To do...

According to an article last week in the Washington Post, the Fairfax County (VA) Attorney fired one of his office's assistant attorneys because she was elected to the council of a city within the county, even though he and his deputy who deals with personnel matters had given her permission to run for office. In a letter sent after...

Carla Miller was interviewed by Gregg Fields for a labcast recently. Here's the description from the Ethics Lab website:

Can independent and local government ethics commissions reduce political corruption? Journalist Gregg Fields interviews Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Network Fellow Carla Miller about putting the heart back into government ethics training, and how a shift towards local government ethics initiatives may create an avenue for citizens to have an impact

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A recent action by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against the city of Harvey, IL, a poor city of 30,000 just south of Chicago, deals with a different sort of fiduciary duty than the usual government ethics case. In a complaint dated June 24, 2014 (attached; see below), the SEC alleges that the city's comptroller acted as financial adviser in three bond issues for a hotel development, diverted some of the funds to himself, and also diverted funds to the city's general fund. The...

One of the most important figures in local government ethics passed away last week at the young age of 61, after a relapse of ovarian cancer. Virginia "Ginny" Looney was Atlanta's first Ethics Officer. She was appointed by Mayor Shirley Franklin, who conceived and pushed through the ethics program back in 2002.

Ginny helped turn Franklin's ideas and an inadequate ethics code into an excellent ethics program. She held the ground against attempts to weaken the program,...

It's the end of an era. Last week, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune, a federal magistrate declared that Chicago was released from the 1972 Shakman consent decree, which was supposed to end patronage (for a long time, however, patronage went underground; see my 2006 blog post...