My most recent blog post involved ethics commission confidentiality. This one involves the other side of the coin:  ethics commission transparency.

I often send blog posts to officials I write about, hoping that they will enter into dialogue about the issue, privately or online, or at least learn something from what I've written. Most local government officials now make their e-mail addresses available online. But, sadly, most local government ethics commission members and even their staff do not.

It's Attack the Ethics Commission week once again, this time in New York State. According to an April 16 article in the Albany Times-Union, a mayor from one party filed a complaint against the deputy majority leader of the New York Senate, who is a member of the other party. The complaint is included below the article, and a statement by the mayor, about the filing, is quoted.

Fast forward to May 15, when the senate majority leader accused the state ethics commission of leaking the commission's letter to the respondent. What important information could possibly be in the letter to the respondent that was not already in the complaint?

Although in 2008, Orange County, Florida's Ethics and Campaign Finance Reform Task Force recommended (report attached; see below) that the county have an ethics board selected by a variety of community organizations, following the model of Miami/Dade County, and Section 2-457 of the county ordinances did provide for (with liberal use of the magic word "may") an ethics advisory board to be selected by the chief judge of the local circuit, Orange County does not appear to have an ethics board.

What it does have is an ombudsman. That is, the county took an inspector general approach to government ethics (and fraud and waste). Not only is that not what was contemplated by the task force, but the individual chosen to be the first ombudsman does not appear to be independent, nor have the credentials or background of an inspector general.

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.

It looks like outsourcing may finally come to local government ethics. No, this doesn't mean that a city's hotline will be picked up by someone in India (in fact, hotlines in some localities are already outsourced to corporations). What it means is that the ongoing failure of scandal-ridden San Bernardino County (CA) to come up with an ethics program (see my blog posts on this) has finally been accepted as part of its government's nature. So, according to an article in the Press-Enterprise this week, the county supervisors have decided to outsource the county's ethics program to the state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). And the FPPC has agreed to take on the job, applying the laws for state officials and employees to those in the county (the FPPC also has ethics provisions relating to local officials and employees, but it generally does not enforce them itself).

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.