I find it fascinating that, although kickbacks (also known as "thanks giving") are one of the central elements of unethical conduct in local governments, I have only mentioned them three times in my blog posts.

Kickbacks are a dirty secret for one principal reason:  they are difficult to prove. Along with bribes, they require hard-to-obtain proof to tie money to conduct. Coincidentally, these are the two forms of conduct that the Supreme Court, in Skilling v. U.S., said the federal honest services fraud statute could be applied to (see my blog post on this decision).

Indefinite conflicts can cause a lot of problems for officials. They see them as not yet ripe, not something they should have to deal with yet. But others see them as looming in the future, and want to know how the official plans to deal with them. One such indefinite conflict is the subject of controversy in Tampa, where a council candidate is the executive director of a nonprofit organization that has a large contract with the city to build affordable apartments. This sort of indefinite conflict comes up a lot.

Another interesting ethics matter is raised in the article on the school board member in Santa Clara County (CA), which I discussed earlier today.

The DA's office notes that the contractor, for whom the school board member had worked as a subcontractor, had no obligation to disclose the conflict, so no charges were filed against it. The DA does not take the next step and ask why this obligation doesn't exist.

There are three basic approaches to enforcing ethics laws:  through ethics commissions, through the criminal process, and through the ballot box. I strongly oppose using the criminal process for ethics violations (see an earlier blog post), and feel that the ballot box is far too crude a way to enforce ethics laws, especially considering that voters do not have the facts or know the laws.

A situation in Santa Clara County (CA) shows that the criminal process can actually be even less effective than the ballot box.

Prof. Patricia Salkin, director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School and author of the Law of the Land blog, has published another of her regular roundup of what's been happening recently in the ethics of land use. Her focus is on cases that have gone to court. I will be discussing a few of the cases in this and further blog posts.

Hidden in the middle of Question 2 on the New York City ballot this week are two important changes in the city's conflicts of interest law (to my knowledge, the nation's only aptly named ethics code). The current conflicts of interest section of the city charter can be found at pp. 319 ff.