Business Associates

A former head of Chicago's public school system has said she will plead guilty to a scheme to take hundreds of thousands of dollars, airfare, meals, and baseball tickets in exchange for steering more than $23 million in no-bid contracts to her former employer, an educational consulting and training…

It all started with a private meeting among three members of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority board, according to an article last week in the Orlando Sentinel. The subject of the informal meeting was the ouster of the executive director, which took place at the next formal meeting. Bu…

Yesterday's blog post discussed the law giving California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) authority over §1090 of the state code, which deals with contract-related conflicts of interest and applies to both local and state officials. Knowing little about this section, which stands outsi…

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the front page of the New York Times the following day. Yesterday, in a post called "Privatization and Transparency," I discussed new types of privatization involving nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit …

One group of individuals with a great deal of power in local government is not covered by local ethics codes or the other aspects of local ethics programs. That group consists of officers of local political parties. Sometimes a party chair is the most powerful individual in the city or county, the …

Two days ago, I wrote about a Louisiana lawyer-legislator who is arguing that disclosure rules should not apply to lawyers, because the practice of law is regulated by the state supreme court. The story behind an indictment in New Jersey this week makes a strong argument for applying disclosure rul…

Do Chinese walls (that is, mechanisms that separate someone from information or involvement in a matter) work in conflict situations in government? And what considerations determine whether they work or not? One consideration is whether, even with the Chinese wall, there is still an appearance of a…

This month, in Portland, CT, home of the stone used to build New York City's brownstones, the new ethics commission found that it was a violation of the town's ethics code for the board of selectmen (the town's management board) to hire attorneys who had given campaign contributions to the board of…

When I heard about the ACORN sting, when two people posing as pimp and prostitute asked for help in getting a loan to open a brothel, I thought: what would happen if a local government official and a prostitute visited a local government attorney to ask for help in giving the prostitute a contract,…