Conning Citizens
Car towing is one of the biggest temptations in local government. A police officer goes to the scene of an accident, and one or more drivers needs to have their cars towed. The drivers are injured or at least in shock, and rarely thinking straight. The officer has been offered so many dollars per car that he steers to a towing company or a bodywork shop with a tow truck. No one will know and no one will be hurt. It might be called a kickback, but it's no more than doing a service for the towing company, a way of moonlighting on the job. At least that's what the officer tells himself.

Despite the many differences between corporate and government ethics, sometimes the corporate ethics world has a lot to teach the government ethics world, especially considering that corporate ethics has a zillion times the personnel and budget to work with.

One example of this appears in a Harvard Business Review blog post yesterday by Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. The post focuses on what ways work in affecting ethics in the workplace, based on studies Gino has done. Since this is an important issue in the government workplace as well, this post is worth a look.

Update: August 26, 2011 (see below)

At the same time there is talk of local government ethics reform in New York State, the new attorney general has his own plan for local government oversight. But it is all criminal in nature.

His idea is to place public integrity officers in all thirteen attorney general offices in the state, starting with Rochester. The new attorney general's predecessor, now the governor, founded the Public Integrity Bureau in 2007, with a mandate to investigate corruption, fraud, and abuse of authority.

You can learn something from every local government ethics code there is, and especially from codes that have only been proposed. Today I'm going to look at a proposed ethics code for Glen Ellyn, IL, a western suburb of Chicago (pop. 27,000). The proposed code and resolution are attached; see below.

I have abstained because some unnamed person tried to question my integrity and silence my voice on this issue. So I was forced to ask the Ethics Officer for an opinion, and she gave me one. She told me I could participate in the debate and that I could actually vote on this issue. But because we're dealing with politics, and, as Jim Maddox always said, you can never take the p out of politics, I've got to think and calculate down the road to see if someone would try to use my vote against me. So to protect myself politically and betray my heart personally, I have had to abstain.… I leave you with this quote.… Benjamin Elijah Mays said, I would rather go to hell of my own volition than stumble into heaven behind the pack of fools. That's my reason for abstaining.

—A member of the Atlanta city council, showing how not to explain one's choice not to vote where there is an appearance of impropriety. His brother works at the city jail, and there was to be a vote regarding whether to sell the jail to the county (see my blog post on this matter from April 2010). This was a gray area matter, where the law did not require withdrawal (and the council member did participate in the matter before abstaining).

According to the Atlanta ethics office's fall newsletter, the Atlanta Board of Ethics reached a settlement with a council member who sought reimbursement from the city for costs related to her campaign newsletter, including payments to campaign workers who distributed it door-to-door in her district just before the 2009 election. She agreed to a fine of $1,500, plus restitution of $5,200 for city funds used to pay campaign expenses. In addition, the council member publicly apologized for her actions.

It so happens that an ethics advisory had been mailed in 2009 to all municipal candidates, telling them not to hand out city-funded newsletters while soliciting votes.