It's always disheartening to see high-level officials misuse an ethics program for the sake of personal revenge or, as the official says in the case I'm looking at here, to get "my name cleared."

According to an article yesterday in the Austin Statesman, the last mayor recently filed two ethics complaints against the mayor who defeated him in May. The complaints allege that the current mayor choked the former mayor, filed accusations of corruption and misconduct against him with the district attorney's office, and sought to damage the former mayor's political reputation for his own political gain.

An interesting question arose in an ethics proceeding in Kennesaw, GA, a city of 30,000 just outside of Atlanta. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a Kennesaw Watch blog post, both dated July 17, soon after an ethics complaint was filed against the city's mayor, the mayor sent two text messages to the complainant, asking for a meeting “man to man face to face."

The Kennesaw Watch blog considered these messages intimidating. According to a Kennesaw Patch article this week, the attorney hired to advise the ethics board, which quickly met to discuss the complaint (and dismissed its allegations for primarily technical reasons), said "that part of dispute resolution includes a meeting between both sides. 'I’ve never gone into court without talking to the other side. I don’t see any hard and fast rule in the ethics code prohibiting this, and I’d venture to say it’s encouraged. We haven’t gone that far in this country to say you can’t talk about your differences.'"

Gift Bans
In Sunday's Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, former state representative Roger Hines wrote a column with the title "What Does Corruptibility Have to Do with a Dollar Figure?" Hines considered the state's $100 limit on gifts from lobbyists. After talking about the value of lobbyists, he talked about the first time (and, apparently, the last time) he accepted sports tickets from a lobbyist:

According to an article in the Times of Trenton yesterday, the FBI raided the homes of Trenton's mayor, as well as the homes of his brother and a major campaign contributor.

For those interested in government ethics, the best thing about the raid is the timeline that went up on the Times of Trenton's website this morning. The timeline provides a play-by-play of a poor ethics environment characterized by the worst sort of cronyism, retaliation against whistleblowers and others, anti-competitive-bidding schemes, participation in a matter involving the mayor's brother, campaign finance and public records violations, misuse of government property, clashes with the council and the state, and resignations galore. And this is just what the newspaper knows before the FBI has even investigated.

It's amazing how much local government ethics activity there is in this July. Here is a miscellany of issues that have arisen in just the last few days.

It is common for councils to engage in backsliding shortly after creating or improving a government ethics program. When there has been a scandal, councils often go further than they would like to go in establishing ethics rules and procedures. When attention to ethics matters has lessened, it often seems to be a good time to make the program more what council members would like, and this almost always means two things:  (1) making it easier for them to accept gifts and (2) making it harder for citizens to file ethics complaints or for complaints to lead to findings of an ethics violation.