Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

Between the American Thanksgiving holiday and throwing out my back so that I couldn't sit at my computer, I missed one of the most fascinating stories of the year:  a judicial dismissal of Toronto's mayor for a conflict of interest violation. The conflict situation was minor, but the way the mayor handled it and the way Toronto's ethics...

In one of my blog posts on the ethics task force's second report, I identified areas that the ethics task force ignored. The first was the low limits on fines. The mayor, in his recommendations, did not recommend increasing...

Ethics program independence is, as far as I'm concerned, the single most important issue in ethics reform. Nothing gains the public's trust as much as an ethics program that is independent from the officials over whom it has jurisdiction.

It is clear from the second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force (attached; see below) that the task force members cared about making the Chicago's ethics program more independent. But the task force stopped short of community...

My second blog post on the Chicago ethics task force's second report identified what I considered to be its worst ideas. Mayor Emanuel's recommendations accepted its bad ideas just as much as its good ideas.

News from British Columbia provides strong evidence of how difficult it is for anyone to deal with his own conflict situation, even a government ethics professional. No one should think that it is easy for someone to see an appearance of impropriety relating to himself or to respond to a conflict allegation against him in anything but a personal manner. A government ethics program must facilitate the process of dealing responsibly with a conflict situation by allowing, or even requiring,...

A situation that arose recently in Atlanta shows how important it is to require applicant disclosure of relationships with local government officials, and to hold applicants accountable. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta's ethics office dismissed allegations that a council member had sponsored and voted on a no-bid contract when...