People use sunshine laws to retaliate against political opponents (it’s easy to find technical violations and use them to show an opponent is not being open; and you don’t even have to find them: newspapers write up baseless allegations just the same).

But it is rare that sunshine laws lead to fisticuffs. According to the Star Press of East Central Indiana, this...

Do ethics board members have a duty to follow more than the letter of their ethics code?

This issue has arisen with respect to the Detroit Board of Ethics. The Board’s chair, attorney Reginald Turner, joined the membership (that is, fundraising) committee of a defense fund for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. A complaint has been filed against the mayor with the Board of Ethics. Therefore, the Board chair is helping to raise funds to defend against a case that may come before the Board. He...

Financial disclosure scares citizens away from sitting on local boards and commissions. This is the “fact” stated every time any level of financial disclosure is discussed. In my state, Connecticut, all the financial disclosure that was required in a recent bill was the name of one’s employer, and yet the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities opposed it with the same old canard.

“Canard” is French for “duck” or, more appropriately in this case, “Duck!” which is effectively what...

There is one local government conflict of interest that is often ignored because it was created at the federal level by a federal statute. The statute is known as the Hatch Act of 1939 (Title 5, Subchapter III), originally known as An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities (they don’t make statute names like they used to).

The Hatch Act limits the political activities...

New York politicians are making life hard for ethical politicians. “Present yourself as ethical,” they are effectively telling them, “and everyone will be harder on you when you don’t live up to expectations. Better to create no expectations at all.”

This isn’t what the government ethics community wants to hear.

The new example of an ethical politician caught with her pants down is New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, as we learned from...

Not all municipal ethics problems arise from a municipality. One place where there is a great deal of opportunity for municipal misconduct is the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. (HUD)

HUD oversees and funds housing authorities across the country. It gets involved, directly and indirectly, in land and development deals and contracts.

As with so many other agencies, the people who run HUD come from the same world as the people they oversee and...