What can a citizen do when a local government official falsely impugns her reputation and retaliates against her due to her opposition to a matter the official supports? The City Ethics Model Code has a provision that deals with an official falsely impugning a citizen's reputation, but very few ethics codes contain such a provision. And even our model code has nothing that deals with retaliation.

In some situations, the citizen may have a cause of action against the official and the local government under 42 U.S.C. §1983, for a deprivation of her constitutional rights, such as her right to speak out on an issue, by a person or entity acting under color of state law.

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."

Whistleblower provisions are extremely important to government ethics, but poorly worded ethics provisions can undermine even the best whistleblower provisions, especially in unscrupulous hands. One such ethics provision is the confidential information provision.

There is no greater pleasure for some people than accusing ethics professionals and ethics commission members of unethical behavior. That is why ethics professionals and ethics commission members have to be extra careful about what they do, and why individuals who have not dealt responsibly with conflicts of interest, at least in the recent past, should not accept a nomination to an ethics commission.

What no one wants to read is what is being written about the current chair of the Florida Commission on Ethics, which has jurisdiction over local government officials and employees. This week, New Times blogger Bob Norman wrote that the EC chair, appointed in 2007, had no-bid work orders from the then Broward assistant school superintendent from 2004-2006 totaling $75,000, marked with "bid waiver," although there was allegedly no formal approval from the school board.

Updates: August 4 and 9, 2010 (see below)
I was just saying to someone the other day that the worst offenses in local government ethics do not involve money. The worst offenses in local government ethics involve intimidation, which causes people to lose their peace of mind, their reputations, and the feeling that they may participate in their local government, things no amount of money can buy. And yet it is the rare ethics complaint or arrest that primarily involves intimidation. Well, this just happened yesterday, in Palm Beach County.

In March I wrote a blog post about a situation in La Crosse, Wisconsin where the mayor brought his father, who runs a refuse business, to meet with a county official about a county solid waste assessment. A council member sought advice from the city attorney rather than the city ethics board, and then the mayor said he would put the matter before the ethics board. His father's company has a refuse contract with the mayor's city.

First Ask for an Advisory Opinion That Doesn't Match the Facts
But according to a La Crosse Tribune article in May, the mayor asked the ethics board "whether it's appropriate to participate in discussions regarding a business he isn't employed by and doesn't have an ownership stake in." His request didn't mention the meetings with the county official, to which he brought his father. In other words, it was a request for advice on a hypothetical situation, when there was a different, real situation involved. This is extremely disingenuous, and the ethics board should have refused to give an opinion.