This week, a citizen in the village of Niles, IL (pop. 30,000) made a proposal for applicant disclosure, something every ethics program should have, but most do not. According to an article in yesterday's Niles Herald-Spectator, the proposal "would ask if the applicant’s officers, directors or partners are related by blood or marriage or reside in the same residence as any Niles elected official, appointed official [or] village employee. It would also require the applicant to disclose information regarding political contributions to any such elected official, appointed official or Niles employee" over the past five years.

According to the blog of Kansas City, MO's mayor, Sly James, the KC Commission on Ethics Reform will be holding a public hearing tomorrow on its draft ethics code.

It's clear from the draft that the commission made excellent use of the City Ethics Model Code. The result is a good draft that falls short in a few very important areas.

Most important, the ethics commission would be selected by the mayor. The mayor would even select who the chair is, something that is ordinarily left to a board or commission. Any time the commission is seen as letting off the mayor or a mayoral ally, or coming down hard on a mayoral opponent, it will undermine the public's trust in the ethics program. There would be a big conflict at the heart of a program designed to prevent conflicts and to gain the public's trust in its city government. Ethics commission independence, real and perceived, is the single most important part of an ethics program. It is the foundation on which everything else stands.

ProPublica ran an excellent article yesterday by Kim Barker and Al Shaw about campaign, PAC, and Super PAC coordination and self-dealing, primarily at the presidential level. What is so special about the article is that it follows the money to where it is being spent. The authors found that many PAC and Super PAC vendors are the same vendors, or different vendors owned by the same people, as the presidential campaigns'. In other words, presidential consultants are also PAC consultants or vendors.

This is also a problem at the local level, especially with local public financing programs, where coordination with PACs is less of an issue (the money is spent on other campaigns). What is prohibited is the taking of funds from PACs. What happens instead is that PACs sometimes pay a candidate's consultants and other vendors, including landlords and utilities when they share an office.

But that's only one of the ways local candidates use vendors to get around prohibitions and limitations.

It's amazing the lengths people will go to when they are accused of bribery. Take Zehy Jereis, a former Yonkers, NY party chair who gave nearly $175,000 to a Yonkers council member, and is being accused of doing this in order to get her to make a pivotal vote in favor of his client's controversial mall, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times.

He says it had nothing to do with the mall. It was love. Unrequited love. Not only did he give the council member all sorts of gifts, but he lost 150 pounds for her, got his teeth and hair fixed for her, and helped pay her brother's high school tuition.

Newspapers aren't called the fourth estate for nothing. But in cities these days, they are more like the third estate, more important, that is, than the clergy. In fact, their investigations and editorials can bring down mayors, council presidents, even parties.

Local dailies may be losing money hand over fist, and weeklies, online papers, and blogs have taken away some of their power, but the dailies still have more power with respect to politicians and policies than anyone else.

We like to think of newspapers as run by the Benjamin Franklins and Bradlees of the world:  neutral, wise, and looking for a scoop. But newspaper owners can be seriously political, and often not in the European way of wearing their politics on their sleeves. This didn't use to be such a big problem, because cities had multiple dailies. Few do now.

The ownership of a city daily by individuals with powerful interests in the community to protect can lead one to thoughts of extending government ethics into the fourth estate. This is the case in Philadelphia, according to an article this week in the New York Times entitled "Interference Seen in Philadelphia Papers."

An ethics bill in the District of Columbia, sponsored by council member Muriel Bowser, went quickly through committee and was passed by the council, with only one dissenting vote, on December 20 (the final committee bill can be found here). What's amazing about it is that, despite the speed with which it moved, Bowser's staff made many improvements to the bill in response to critiques from me and others. It is not a perfect bill, of course, but it's a pretty special gift for the holiday season.