The situation of Rose Pak, a power broker for San Francisco's Chinese-American community who was featured a week ago in a New York Times article, raises some interesting questions. A paid consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, she has never held public office. Nor has she ever registered as a lobbyist or been an official member of a campaign, even that of the Chinese-American man who was just elected mayor, Edwin Lee. According to the article, she has mobilized Chinese votes, volunteers, and contributions for a succession of mayors and city supervisors in return for city financing of social programs and building projects in Chinatown. She also helps Chinese-Americans get appointments in the city government, most notably Lee's appointment as interim mayor (he had been the city administrator).

“The concern with potential corruption does not stop just because the relationship has entered the bedroom.’’

For those of you who think my blog needs a little spice, this is a good ice breaker. These are the words of Kathay Feng, head of California Common Cause, spoken at a meeting of the Fair Political Practices Commission, California's state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over local officials and employees (quoted from yesterday's PolitiCal column in the Los Angeles Times). The issue was a proposal to allow officials in a “dating relationship’’ with a lobbyist to accept and not disclose “personal benefits commonly exchanged between people on a date or in a dating relationship.’’

Lawrence Lessig's excellent new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve, Oct. 5, 2011) is about Congress and mostly about campaign finance, but it is also an important look at institutional corruption that has some valuable things to say that are relevant to local government ethics.

Lessig, who is director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, came to government ethics in an interesting fashion. As a law professor specializing in copyright law, he sought to make out-of-print but copyrighted books available to the public. But his efforts, as reasonable, as clearly in the public interest, and as consistent with the Constitution (which actually mentions copyright) as can be, went nowhere. Instead, copyrights were extended more and more.

Institutional Corruption
Lessig came to realize that what caused these extensions, institutional corruption, is "the gateway problem: until we solve it, we won't solve any number of other critical problems." True reform, in any area, is impossible as long as the current institutional situation remains. Therefore, he switched his focus from copyright to government ethics, with an emphasis on campaign finance.

What can be done when a public agency that gives gifts to public officials destroys its gift records?

This question arises from an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week about the Alpharetta (GA) Convention and Visitors Bureau, an independent agency funded partially by a local hotel tax. According to the article, the bureau's CEO destroyed her records of the gifts – tickets mostly to see famous music acts – she gave out to people such as members of the city council after 2009. The city attorney told her that it was a "personal task list" and, therefore, there was no legal requirement that she track the tickets. Once again, here's a city attorney who acts as if he didn't know there was such a thing as an appearance of impropriety. Is the concept really that difficult to understand?

I came across a decision in Patty Salkin's Law of the Land blog today involving a federal statute that allows federal prosecution of those who give gifts to local officials in amounts greater than $5,000. Proof of bribery is not necessary, but evidence needs to be shown that the gift was given "with intent to influence or reward." This is somewhere between a gift provision in an ethics code and a bribery provision in a criminal code. The local government must have received federal funding, but this is true of most local governments, especially the larger ones. 18 U.S.C §666(a)(2) reads as follows:

It is a given (although not a fact) that everyone wants to make it as easy as possible to vote. Voting is the principal way most people participate in a democracy, and choosing our local officials is the way we determine the direction and quality of management of our community. In most countries, voting day is a day off, but this is not true for most people in the U.S. So it is important to find other ways of making voting easier for people with full-time jobs.

Recently, more thought has been given to this. But making it easier to vote usually costs money, and this has been a principal objection especially from those most concerned with government spending. Most of these same people are very supportive of public-private partnerships, so that the world of commerce pays for and runs more government operations.

According to an article yesterday in the Indianapolis Star, these two issues have collided in Marion County, home of Indianapolis. Democrats favor two satellite sites for early voting (in addition to the City-County Building), but the Republicans have opposed doing this on grounds of cost. So the Democrats took a feather from the Republican cap and had a local auto workers union offer $50,000 to pay for the satellite sites.