Conflicts

Again, a very public federal conflict of interest matter provides valuable material relevant to local government ethics. This time it's former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr.'s relationship with the firm he formerly headed, Goldman Sachs, the subject of a front-page story in Sunday's New York Times.

Update below (August 10, 2009):
When an official has a conflict of interest, the usual course is to withdraw from any discussion or vote on the matter. But this is not always the case. Sometimes a conflict of interest requires that a responsible official speak up.

The great majority of local governments that think they have no state or local law or rules regarding local officials' conflicts of interest do actually have a conflict of interest rule.

This rule is hidden in Robert's Rules, which is usually the set of rules under which local government bodies operate. Here is what it says in §45 (Voting Procedure), in the first subsection on Rights and Obligations in Voting (I'm quoting from the Perseus Publishing tenth edition, pp.394-395):

Open Records Requests and Ethics Proceedings
In an unusual twist on the confidentiality of ethics proceedings, counsel for the Colorado Springs mayor's former client, the person who gave rise to the mayor's apparent conflict of interest, has made an open records request for all documents related to the ethics proceeding against the mayor, according to an article in the Colorado...

While so many local governments don't take conflicts seriously enough to require recusal, some take conflicts too seriously, and overreact. This appears to be what happened in Elizabethtown (NY), according to an article in yesterday's Press-Republican.

Nepotism is often left out of ethics codes because it does not seem all that unethical. Another reason for leaving nepotism out is that it is so common, especially in the uniformed departments, that local government officials are afraid to touch it. When nepotism rules do appear, they often provide for grandfathering in current nepotism, and for waivers, even if waivers are not available for other ethics code violations.