Disclosure

Over-reaction to an alleged ethics violation can be as bad as under-reaction. In Bergen County, NJ, after one of seven freeholders (the county council), at his first meeting, voted to continue to keep county funds in a bank owned by the parent of the company he works for, an ethics complaint was filed and then the county administrator called on all county offices to take their money out of the bank, according to...

There's a lot to learn from the chief of New Orleans' emergency medical service's past conflicts of interest, which have only recently become public. Despite the compassion one must feel for the official, the conflicts were poorly handled by her and by the former mayor and his administration.

According to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, in late 2005 the EMS chief...

Note: This blog post was posted on September 22, and I accidentally deleted it. This is a reposting.

What is recusal? More to the point, does the act of recusal require merely inaction, or action, or action and words? This has become an issue in the city of Santa Fe, but it is important to establish a definition for the purpose of government ethics.

Two days ago, I wrote about a Louisiana lawyer-legislator who is arguing that disclosure rules should not apply to lawyers, because the practice of law is regulated by the state supreme court. The story behind an indictment in New Jersey this week makes a strong argument for applying disclosure rules to lawyers, as they are in California and North Carolina, only...

Lawyer-legislators are extremely creative people. The latest use of their creativity is to argue that ethics boards cannot require disclosure of a conflict of interest that arises from legal representation because they have no jurisdiction over the practice of law. Only the state Supreme Court has that jurisdiction.

The lawyer-legislator in this matter is state senator Rob Marionneaux of Louisiana, a state whose ethics code applies to local governments. According to...

I make a great effort to be nonpartisan in choosing what and whom I write about. I am an unaffiliated voter who believes in nonpartisan local government. But yesterday, the Republican Party took a strong stand against government ethics and, in its most important statement in years, totally ignored it.