The Missouri Ethics Commission has put up a nice slideshow-with-audio presentation on the many changes made to its ethics and campaign finance laws in Senate Bill 844 (it used Adobe Presenter software, but there are likely other alternatives). It's a good way to do reform-specific training.

But, as the presentation states, it is incomplete. In fact, of the four new provisions I focused on in a recent blog post, only two of them are mentioned in the presentation. De novo judicial review of EC decisions is one provision not mentioned. The other, although important, is specific to EC members and staff.

A new way to obtain ethics reform is making some headway in New York State. A number of former bigwigs, including former governor Mario Cuomo, and former NYC mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, have created an organization called New York Uprising and a three-part pledge, one of which calls for a new state ethics commission and financial disclosure requirements (the other two involve redistricting and budget-making).

Legislative candidates who sign all three pledges will be designated a Hero of Reform. Those who refuse to sign will be designated an Enemy of Reform.

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, the New York Governor’s Task Force on Public Authorities Reform has filed its report (not yet available online) on the implementation of the Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009, whose provisions are summarized in a separate document.

The task force was created in December 2009 to assess the effectiveness of the Act and and come up with ways to improve the accountability of state and local public authorities.

One of the report's most important findings, according to the article, is "that politicians were inserting themselves in the business of authorities, which are supposed to be independent bodies, by sometimes pressuring their appointees to vote in certain ways."

I've been writing a lot about the controversies surrounding a new Broward County (FL) ethics code, but there's also been controversy in the Broward County School District that is likely to lead to an ethics code of its own (according to a Miami Herald editorial on Saturday, a former school board member pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges this year, and another member revealed that her husband works for a firm that frequently lobbies the school board).

Gifts from restricted sources, that is, from those doing business with the local government (and their lobbyists), are exceptionally damaging, in that they make the public believe their officials can be bought or that their officials are running a pay-to-play government. It's too bad that at least some members of the Los Angeles ethics commission don't recognize this.

Below are the opinions of two candidates running in a primary for a seat on the Effingham County, GA commission, which perfectly present two very different views of local government ethics, one pseudo-religious (people are good or bad), the other professional (people need guidance):