City Related

Update: February 7, 2014
It took the Jon Stewart Show three months to catch up with the City Ethics blog, but it was worth the wait. You have to watch the video they made about the Coralville, IA situation I discuss below. The defense of what occurred is truly incredible.

There has always been independent spending in local elections, and it has always been (and been seen as) a source of...

Updated: November 20, 2013 (see below)

The gift regulation proposed by Philadelphia's ethics board last week (attached; see below) provides a great opportunity to consider many issues involving gift bans and exceptions.

It's a great thing that the ethics board has chosen to provide guidance with respect to the city's gift ban, which is not itself very clear. However, I don't think it did a very good job. I'm a big fan of Philadelphia's ethics program, but this...

Party Committee Members on EC
According to an article in the Hartford Courant this week, a Newington, CT mayoral candidate, and council minority leader, who has made ethics allegations against the incumbent mayor has chosen not to file an ethics complaint because, she says, two of the four members of the town's ethics board are also members of...

A recent City Ethics blog post discusses the value of a functional definition of a government employee with respect to government ethics. That is, a private individual who does government work for the government has the same obligations to the community as a government employee.

Since a government employee's obligations derive from a fiduciary duty to the community (see...

It's exciting to read a column on a local government ethics matter that shows as deep understanding and as clear explanation as the column by Ottawa Citizen editorial board member Mohammed Adam that appeared yesterday. The column focuses on the problems that arise when a city planner is a small property developer on the side. Both the chair of the city's planning...

There are two interesting wrinkles in the Forest Park, GA case I wrote about in the last blog post. According to an article in the Clayton News Daily last Friday, a former Forest Park public works director alleged in an ethics complaint that, in an e-...