making local government more ethical
In November 2010, Broward County, FL voters approved an ethics code for officials of the cities in the county (the code also applies to the county commissioners). The code finally became effective January 2, 2012.

Three cities in Broward County (home to Ft. Lauderdale) have put referendum questions on the January 31 ballot seeking to strike the applicability of certain of the code's provisions to their cities' officials. The principal one is the requirement to disclose one's outside salary. Personally, I don't think disclosing a salary is necessary. It's sufficient to ask officials to say they are paid, say, more than $20,000 by an employer, or more than $5,000 by a client, to show that the job is serious and there is a financially meaningful relationship with a client.

What is notable about changing this particular provision is how self-serving it is for mayors to waste the public's time on a question that is only intended to protect their privacy. Of course, the argument is made that otherwise officials will resign in huge numbers. But if officials were to resign in huge numbers, the law would likely be changed. The fact is that disclosure requirements always lead to this argument, but rarely to the reality. When there were mass resignations in Oregon a couple of years ago (see my blog post), the officials either quickly were appointed again or others were appointed to replace them. The predictions did not come true, and the public did not suffer.

Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.

In Georgia, Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) are a creation of state government (they're in the amended 1984 state constitution) that involves local governments in serious potential conflicts of interest, in order to allow developers to fund their public infrastructure with tax-free bonds. CIDs are a clever idea, but cleverness is often inconsistent with government ethics. Smith, Gambrell & Russell, a law firm, has a good, short overview of CIDs.

The county and/or city in which a CID is located approves and even participates in the management of the CID (the local government(s) gets one seat on the CID board). Approval by landowners is not based on one-person one-vote, but rather on the value of real estate, which gives the power to commercial entities. The major landowners also vote for board members. But all landowners pay the assessments, along with their county taxes, so that the county is involved in this aspect, as well.

CIDs can also enter into cooperation agreements with counties or cities, so that, for example, a county may agree to maintain the roads built with bonds issued by a CID.

It's not every day that an article about an insufficiently bid county contract appears on the front page of a major newspaper, but that's what happened today with the New York Times.

Insufficiently bid contracts are one of the most serious signs of corruption in local government. The requirement of competitive bidding of local government contracts is the first of a two-part attempt to ensure that contracts are made in the public interest rather than to favor the personal and political interests of officials.

The second part is the hard part: ensuring that contracts are truly bid on an open, competitive basis. When contract specifications favor a particular bidder, or keep out one or more low-price bidders, or other efforts are made to prevent unfavored companies from bidding, it is clear that the procurement system is seriously corrupt.

Last week, I wrote about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision invalidating a Montgomery County's ethics code to the extent it applied to the employees of independent agencies, such as the district attorney's office.

According to an article in yesterday's Pokiomen Valley Patch, the district attorney, who brought the suit, spoke publicly about the decision. She said, “[The county commissioners'] actions were nothing more than an interference on the independence of an elected official. ... I have extensive ethical guidelines. My staff has been following my rules all along, not the [county] commissioners'.”

For one thing, those extensive ethical guidelines are not available on the DA's website, so the public cannot know whether they even cover the same areas as the county ethics code.

It's fascinating how different issues are important to local government officials in difference places at different times. I couldn't say that officials will always dig in their heels and fight this ethics provision, or that another ethics provision never raises an eyebrow.

Take Broward County, FL, for example. After numerous arrests and convictions of local officials, the county commission passed a new ethics ordinace, and the county's citizens voted to have this ordinance apply to the county's municipalities (see my November 2010 blog post).

Many of the municipalities had problems with the ordinance, so the county commission asked the Broward League of Cities for its recommended changes in adapting the county code to municipalities. The county ordinance and the League's revised version are attached below, so that you can open them side by side, if you'd like. You might also want to look at the Sun-Sentinel's chart comparing the two.