According to the blog of Kansas City, MO's mayor, Sly James, the KC Commission on Ethics Reform will be holding a public hearing tomorrow on its draft ethics code.

It's clear from the draft that the commission made excellent use of the City Ethics Model Code. The result is a good draft that falls short in a few very important areas.

Most important, the ethics commission would be selected by the mayor. The mayor would even select who the chair is, something that is ordinarily left to a board or commission. Any time the commission is seen as letting off the mayor or a mayoral ally, or coming down hard on a mayoral opponent, it will undermine the public's trust in the ethics program. There would be a big conflict at the heart of a program designed to prevent conflicts and to gain the public's trust in its city government. Ethics commission independence, real and perceived, is the single most important part of an ethics program. It is the foundation on which everything else stands.

The Schumpeter column in this week's Economist talks about the corporate chief legal officer (CLO), who due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's requirements has become a major figure at the top of every big corporation. Much as the city or county attorney is a major figure at the top of every local government.

What struck me about the column is how similar Schumpeter's description of the CLO is to how a city or county attorney should be, but too often is not. One CLO is quoted as saying that "before taking the job, a lawyer should interview his chief executive. If you can’t say no to that person, 'you don’t want to work for that company.'" How many city attorneys have done this?

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts related to bringing false charges against other county officials over a period of years, according to an article in yesterday's Arizona Republic. According to Prof. Bennett Gershman of Pace University, "This is a huge victory for good-government people and people who believe that prosecutors should be accountable for misconduct."

But it is a bigger victory for those who believe government attorneys should be held accountable for their misconduct, whether or not they are prosecutors. Government attorneys are rarely held to account for providing poor ethics advice, or poor advice on any topic. They are rarely held to account for wearing multiple hats and failing to withdraw when their roles are in conflict.

I never know where I'm going to find something that inspires a blog post on local government ethics. This time it was an essay by Tim Parks in the March 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, as well as on the NYRBlog. The essay is about Italy, and the possibility for change in its government, economy, and culture. Parks, a British novelist and once literary translator from Italian into English who has lived in Italy for many years, notes two things about Italian political culture that resonated with me here in the U.S.

One aspect of Italian culture that Parks noted was "a tendency in general to foment and then thrive on a gap between the official version of events and their actual course, between rules and practice, appearance and reality." This isn't exactly lying. It's something much more serious, because it is more pervasive and insidious. A lie is something limited. For example, saying you've cut taxes when you've increased the mill rate. What Parks is referring to is a cultural norm where nothing that is said is actually true, where written rules aren't followed in practice, where what you see is never what you get.

Music to my ears in an order yesterday from the federal court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, in a case involving an unsuccessful attempt by certain Wisconsin state legislators to claim the attorney-client privilege with respect to documents relating to redistricting. What resonates so nicely is the way the court considered state citizens to be the client of the private lawyer. Since they would, of course, be the client of a government lawyer as well, this decision would apply even more forcefully, but without the talk of "shamefulness," to documents discussed with government lawyers.

Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.