Ethics Codes

An Oakland Ethics Reform Proposal According to an article this week in the Mercury News, an Oakland, CA council member has proposed to more than triple the city ethics commission's staff, expand its oversight powers to include campaign finance and lobbying (currently handled by the city clerk), hav…

Prince George's County, MD Prince George's County had a big scandal involving the county executive back in 2010. The new county executive vowed to make serious ethics reform a priority, and did some valuable things in 2011, according to an article in the Washington Post. He created an ethics review…

Over the last few weeks, while I was putting the finishing touches on the second edition of the book Local Government Ethics Programs, there was a lot of action in the area of ethics reform. In the next few blog posts, I will summarize the action. Orange County, CA According to an article yesterday…

It's a good idea for states to encourage the creation of local government ethics programs by drafting model ethics codes. It's also a good idea for states to require minimal local government ethics provisions. What is not good is model codes and minimal requirements that are not accompanied by expl…

In recent years, Florida's elected officials have shown a great deal of leadership in the field of unethical and criminal misconduct. The state has a weak state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over local officials, and until recently only one good local government ethics program, in Miami…

I don't write about Jacksonville much, because my colleague at City Ethics, Carla Miller, is the city's ethics officer. She has been working hard to ensure that the city's ethics commission is given more authority and independence, and that the city's ethics laws are improved. This week, the counci…

Last month, I did a blog post on the huge exceptions to Alabama's new gift provisions (pp. 24-26). What I didn't note was the similarities, and the gulf, between the bribery provision in Alabama's constitution and the gift provisions in the old and new statutes, and how this has been dealt with, or…

In February, Florida governor Charlie Crist asked for a grand jury to report on government corruption in Florida. The first interim report was filed yesterday. Its recommendations involve local government as well as state ethics laws. The report begins (p. 3) by characterizing fraud, waste, and abu…