Conflicts

A no-bid or improperly bid contract cannot help but create an appearance of impropriety. And yet not only do elected officials keep defending them, but they also refuse to acknowledge the appearance of impropriety that surrounds every one of them, especially when elected officials and their family members are involved. Here are two current examples, one in Dallas, the other in Richmond, KY, a city of 33,000 about 90 miles from Churchill Downs.

(illustration from illegalsigns.ca, Toronto)

I haven't mentioned billboard companies in my blog. It's about time. Billboard companies can be a serious source of apparent impropriety and corruption in local government. And this is an important time for them, because things are changing in the billboard world. It's no longer mostly about old-fashioned billboards along highways. It's digital supergraphics on buildings and all sorts of 21st-century innovations that...

In my most recent blog post, I pointed out how vague the concept of an "interest" is for most people. I would like to discuss this problem further, because I think it is the cause of much misunderstanding, as well as weaknesses in ethics code drafting.

Update: April 29, 2010 (see below)

The idea of a possible conflict of interest should not be an excuse for a fishing expedition to find relationships between local government legislators and people or contracts they vote on. This appears to be what is happening in Crossville, a town of 9,000 in east-central Tennessee.

It would be easy to say that politics is a team sport, like football, while ethics is an individual sport, like tennis. But this simply isn't true. Both ethical behavior and unethical behavior can be done as a team.

Gray areas in local government ethics don't necessarily have to be gray areas.

According to an article last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a council member whose brother is a lieutenant in the city jail has been very vocal in opposing a plan to lease the jail to the county in which Atlanta sits. It is possible that the council member's brother would lose his job...