City Related

Canadian mayors don't appear to be having a good time of it lately, ethicswise. Montreal's mayor resigned, Toronto's mayor was dismissed by a judge, and now it looks like the conflict situations of Winnipeg's mayor will be his downfall if he runs for a fourth term, according to...

Annapolis is an unusual little city in many ways. It may only have 40,000 residents, but it's the state capital, the county seat, the home of the U.S. Naval Academy, and equidistant, and not far, from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. With respect to government ethics, the county for which it is the county seat, Anne Arundel County, has a relatively good ethics program, complete with an executive director, which is very...

In a quality government ethics program, every official and employee involved in a matter publicly discloses any possible conflict and withdraws from the matter. But what if a city or county does not have a quality government ethics program? How is the public to know whether conflicts are being handled responsibly?

According to an article in today's New Haven (CT) ...

When the economy is booming, local government corruption feeds off the sale of government land, development projects, and construction contracts. When the economy is doing poorly, there is usually less money floating around to fund corruption. But in bad times, local governments are willing to accept the help of companies and nonprofits, which might have (or appear to have) their own interests at stake in what they fund for local governments. This leads to another set of problems.

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Between the American Thanksgiving holiday and throwing out my back so that I couldn't sit at my computer, I missed one of the most fascinating stories of the year:  a judicial dismissal of Toronto's mayor for a conflict of interest violation. The conflict situation was minor, but the way the mayor handled it and the way Toronto's ethics...

In one of my blog posts on the ethics task force's second report, I identified areas that the ethics task force ignored. The first was the low limits on fines. The mayor, in his recommendations, did not recommend increasing...