Advisory Opinions | City Ethics

February 25, 2013

A New, But Very Weak Regional Ethics Program in Connecticut

[Note: I have made changes throughout this blog post, based on a February 25 e-mail message from the COG executive director] It should feel good when a pet idea of yours becomes a reality. My pet idea is the regional ethics program, whose biggest successes have been of the countywide variety, such …

February 23, 2013

A Contentious Conflict Situation in Kansas City, KS

Some very interesting issues arise out of a past (and present) conflict situation that has become an issue in this week's mayoral primary in the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, KS ("UG"). The conflict situation appears simple at first glance, but it is not. In 2007, a UG com…

February 18, 2013

Winter Reading: Switch V - Simplifying and Motivating

Simplifying Self-Supervision In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that self-control or, more accurately, self-supervision is an exhaustible resource. What looks like laziness or selfishness is often simply exhaustion. Self-supervision…

Ethics Commissions & Administration February 12, 2013

EC Member Withdrawal in a Case Involving an Appointing Authority

Note: When I originally wrote this blog post, I erroneously assumed that the ethics commission member whose conflict situation I discuss was the only one selected by the assembly speaker. I since learned that three of the members were selected by the assembly speaker. I would argue, therefore, that…

February 12, 2013

Winter Reading: Switch II - Shaping the Path Toward Change

In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath focus on three general ways to shape the path toward change: tweak the environment, build habits, and rally the herd. Rallying the herd means letting people know what others are doing. When most people…

Ethics Commissions & Administration January 17, 2013

An Ethics Officer Worth Emulating

It's rare to find a newspaper article that truly appreciates the work a city ethics officer does. So I'm including the entire article below. It's from the Jacksonville Times-Union, and Jacksonville's ethics officer happens to be City Ethics President Carla Miller. Had it been anyone else, I would h…

Ethics Commissions & Administration January 3, 2013

Independent Non-Sitting Ethics Panels in Georgia

I'm a big supporter of making ethics commissions independent of those over whom they have jurisdiction. Milton, Georgia and, now, Forsyth County, Georgia have come up with an interesting approach to ethics commission independence that has one good point and several bad points. The recent amendments…

Ethics Codes & Reform January 2, 2013

Tennessee's Model Ethics Codes Fail to Create Local Ethics Programs

It's been six years since I last wrote about local government ethics in Tennessee. In a January 2007 comment to the forum on recusal, I focused on the fact that the University of Tennessee's Municipal Technical Advisory Service (MTAS) (which operates in cooperation with the Tennessee Municipal Leag…

Conflicts of Interest December 14, 2012

The Swords of Politics and the Shield of Government Ethics

No one wants a political government ethics program, and yet the people who most often worry out loud that it will be political want it to be political. This apparent paradox can be explained by looking at the various meanings of the word "political." Which of these meanings is most important to a g…

Ethics Commissions & Administration December 5, 2012

An Excellent Report Recommending an Ethics Program for a Regional Transit Authority

In October, I wrote a blog post about a report commissioned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), based on an investigation of an ethics issue involving a Washington, D.C. council member and transit authority board member. The focus of my post was on the conflicted situatio…

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