Ethics Commissions/Administration

Yesterday, at the annual conference of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL), the only association of state and local government ethics professionals, Judge Anthony Wilhoit was given the COGEL Award, which is given annually to someone who has "made a significant, demonstrable, and positive contribution to the fields of campaign finance, elections, ethics, freedom of information or lobbying for a significant period of time." As the executive director...

Between the American Thanksgiving holiday and throwing out my back so that I couldn't sit at my computer, I missed one of the most fascinating stories of the year:  a judicial dismissal of Toronto's mayor for a conflict of interest violation. The conflict situation was minor, but the way the mayor handled it and the way Toronto's ethics...

In one of my blog posts on the ethics task force's second report, I identified areas that the ethics task force ignored. The first was the low limits on fines. The mayor, in his recommendations, did not recommend increasing...

Ethics program independence is, as far as I'm concerned, the single most important issue in ethics reform. Nothing gains the public's trust as much as an ethics program that is independent from the officials over whom it has jurisdiction.

It is clear from the second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force (attached; see below) that the task force members cared about making the Chicago's ethics program more independent. But the task force stopped short of community...

My second blog post on the Chicago ethics task force's second report identified what I considered to be its worst ideas. Mayor Emanuel's recommendations accepted its bad ideas just as much as its good ideas.

The second round of Chicago ethics reform recommendations, based on the ethics task force's second report (attached; see below), have been proposed by Chicago's mayor Rahm Emanuel (click here to read a summary...