City Related

"None of the unions ever asked me for a quid pro quo. They, like anyone else who is giving, they just want to know their points get heard. They are not asking that you agree with it. They have said, ‘We don’t expect you to agree on everything. We understand it is a negotiation.’”

—Toni Harp, candidate for mayor of New Haven, CT, on the $48,000 she and the alderpersons effectively on her ticket were given by labor unions (...

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...

It's sad that it took the Appellate Division of New York state's Supreme Court (not the top court in the state) to disqualify a town attorney from a case when that attorney's firm had represented the opposing party in a matter substantially related to the case.

Government ethics tends to focus on one side of conflict of interest situation. That is, an ethics program...

On April 17, the District of Columbia ethics board filed recommendations for ethics reform with the council (see my blog post on the recommendations). Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie has introduced a bill that includes some of these recommendations (attached; see below). On...

When people write about public campaign financing programs, they tend to focus on participation percentages and the size of the campaign contributions. But what is most interesting about the analysis done by the New Haven Independent of campaign contributions given to mayoral candidates participating and not participating in the city's public financing program, the New Haven...

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...