Transparency is often seen as a technical, often annoying part of municipal ethics. All those notices and agendas that have to be filed at the right time in the right place, all those document requests from the news media and opposition parties. Is all this really necessary for good government? Does it lower taxes, provide better services? Or is it just a pain in the neck?

Sometimes you need a big disaster – Enron, for example – for people to understand the cost of not acting...

The Ethics Resource Center in Washington DC has released an interesting document for anyone active in the Ethics & Compliance Officer field - see the quotes below which give a taste of the subject of the document:

Has your city’s government grown up yet, ethically speaking?

This isn't as silly a question as it sounds. All of us develop morally, just as we develop physically and intellectually and emotionally. We just don’t see our height grow or get university degrees or get married and have children, ethically speaking.

The same is true of municipal governments, according to James S. Bowman in his essay “The Ethical Professional,” which appears in...

Not one of the recent books in my ethics library cites Jane Jacobs’ 1993 work, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. The citations I found on-line do not include any about government ethics. This is a big loss for the government ethics community, because Jacobs, who died a couple of years ago, gave us a lot to think about. And we’ve been missing out.

Jacobs’ book (in the form of a dialogue among a group of people) sets out two...

I would like to nominate the new film Charlie Wilson’s War, a Mike Nichols film starring Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Julia Roberts, for the City Ethics Top Ten Ethics Films list.

Charlie Wilson is a multi-term congressman whose principal activities are drinking, diddling, and (a distant third) deal-making. He happens to also become the major force behind U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen against...

In a very interesting step recently, the "Zionsville Town Council approved 5-0 Monday, Dec. 3, an expanded conflict of interest policy that includes a clause urging council members to recuse themselves from any vote involving a campaign contributor."