Ethics Commissions/Administration

After Common Cause questioned the fitness of Baltimore's government ethics director for his job, an opinion piece called for him to be fired, and...

Intimidation is, I believe, the worst kind of ethical misconduct in government, because (1) it limits or changes participation of people in the democratic process, (2) it is emotionally damaging, and (3) it enables all sorts of ethical misconduct. Intimidation is a fundamental form of misuse of power and position. (For more about intimidation, see the section of my book on this topic...

It is important to bring contractors into an ethics program, requiring them to disclose gifts their employees make to officials, and to deal responsibly with possible conflicts they are aware of. Businesses tend to deal with such things internally. Bringing them into an ethics program requires them to recognize that dealing with conflict situations internally is not enough.

The fact is that most ethics programs do not place sufficient requirements on contractors. Often, ethics...

Last week, a resident from one of the towns next to mine (Wallingford, CT) called me for advice regarding his request for an advisory opinion. The request involved the appropriateness of council members affiliated with a church participating in a matter that involved funding for renovation of a wall along the church's parking lot. This is a difficult conflict situation, but some town officials made it much more complicated than it had to be. Not only did the ethics board, mayor, and council...

Update: October 10, 2012 (see below)

So far, I have ignored this year's most famous local ethics proceeding, against San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. The reason I ignored it is the reason I am writing about it now:  I think the proceeding should have been dismissed because the sheriff's misconduct involved neither a conflict of interest nor his official duties.

The fact that the complaint was brought by the mayor against an opponent on the city's board of...

It's valuable to put government ethics in the larger context of the use of public office for private purposes that does not involve a financial benefit for anyone. In other words, much of politics is personal. A review in this weekend's New York Times Book Review got me thinking about this. The book, by Seth Rosenfeld, is entitled...