The Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force report was published yesterday. Well, at least Part 1 was published. As I said in my blog post about the announcement of the task force's creation, "four months, including the holiday season, is a short time for four people and their likely inexperienced lawyers to deal with a huge city's ethics program."

The task force managed to draft an 83-page report in a little less than five months, which is a major feat. The report reflects a great amount of research and contains a lot of good ideas. But the report does not present a vision of a comprehensive ethics program for Chicago. It merely makes recommendations, 34 of them to be precise.

For the second time in a year, a local ethics commission has been the subject of a grand jury report. The first was San Francisco's (see my blog post). There, it was a civil grand jury and the focus was on the commission. Here and now, it is a criminal grand jury, and the focus is on the county executive and other officials, as well as ethics commission members. The county is Suffolk, on Long Island, a suburban county of 1.5 million people.

The Need for an Independently Selected Ethics Commission
The Suffolk grand jury report shows an extreme example of what happens when ethics commission members are selected by high-level officials in a poor ethics environment. This worst case was one of ongoing secret, political interference in ethics commission matters and ongoing political warfare that placed the ethics commission right in the middle between the two front lines.

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.

On April 5, the county commission in Wayne County, MI (which includes Detroit) passed a new ethics ordinance (attached; see below), following multiple scandals. It contains many good provisions, but it does not create a government ethics program. By this, I mean that it does not provide an independent ethics commission, it does not provide for an ethics officer or other independent staff member, it does not provide for ethics training and only provides for written advice at an ethics board meeting within thirty days, which can be very difficult to achieve. Its disclosure requirements are minimal. And it does not provide for the ethics board to initiate its own complaints when it is given information but no individual is willing to risk filing a complaint (and here the principal burden of providing information is on the complainant, not on the ethics board).

Like so many attempts at ethics reform, this one appears to be too focused on solving problems that have arisen. In this case, the focus is on procurement, so that conflicts relating to land use, grants, and other areas where individuals and businesses benefit from government are ignored. And like so many attempts at ethics reform, this one appears to be lawyer-driven, focused on laws rather than ethics, that is, on provisions and enforcement rather than training, advice, and disclosure, which are the heart of any government ethics program.

Proximity rules are common to local and state government ethics codes nationwide (see my blog post on them from five years ago). They require officials to withdraw from any matter dealing with property within a certain distance of property they own or rent, no matter how many others have property within the same proximity.

According to a big exposé piece in yesterday's Washington Post, "Congressional representatives are required to certify that they do not have a financial stake in the actions they take." But the rules they have written to apply to themselves do not address proximity. The issue is not proximity, but the process by which proximity was not addressed.

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions.

I would like to share one of these provisions that is truly worth thinking about. It appears in the Windsor, CO ethics code:

§5.2.M. No elected or appointed official or public body member shall offer or promise to give his or her vote or influence in favor of or against any proposed official action in consideration or upon condition that any other elected or appointed official, public body member, will promise or assent to give his or her vote or influence in favor of or against any other proposed official action.