Misuse of Office/Special

The first blog post on the West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) matter looked at it from the point of view of the timing of withdrawal from participation. This post will look at it from the point of view of post-employment issues. A third post will look at this matter in the context of multiple CRA problems in Florida.

The West Palm Beach matter raises the...

Timing is everything. That is the principal lesson to be learned from a conflict situation in West Palm Beach, FL. According to articles in the Palm Beach Post and on the WLRN website, the director of the city's...

When I put in the DVD yesterday evening, I did not expect the movie Admission (2013; written by Karen Croner, based on a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd) to be a revelatory movie about the mishandling of conflicts of interest situations. But it is. Not in government (it's about a university admissions employee), but the situations are easily applicable.

I can't tell the whole...

Here's a what-not-to-do scenario of a sort that is too rarely included in ethics training. And yet it's one that could save a lot of officials, as well as ethics programs, a great deal of trouble, and help maintain public trust in local government.

According to an article in Tuesday's Miami Herald, a Miami commissioner, who was pulled over for a traffic...

On August 29, the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability issued an advisory opinion on the important and far too overlooked topic of constituent services (attached; see below). The issuing of advisory opinions that cover more than a very specific set of facts, what I call "general advisory opinions," is itself very valuable (see the section of my book...

It came to my attention in an interview with Professor James Svara, for a paper I am writing for the journal Public Integrity, that in March 2013, the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) made substantial — sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful, sometimes baffling — changes to its Code of Ethics (the revised code is attached; see below). This post will look at the changes that involve conflicts of interest.