Applicant Disclosure Is Good for Officials
If Ontario or Mississauga required broad applicant disclosure, Mississauga's mayor would not be in court this week arguing that she didn't know that her son had invested in a huge hotel and convention center deal. According to an article yesterday on the 680 News Radio site, she has been alleged to have voted with a conflict, and could be forced to resign as mayor.

The mayor has said in her defense that she didn't read a crucial document containing her son's name, because she didn't have her reading glasses. She has to plead ignorance, something that, of course, she cannot prove. Had her son been required to disclose that his mother was the mayor, she would have been alerted and she could have withdrawn. Had she not withdrawn, there would be no need for a trial.

A settlement in a Massachusetts ethics proceeding can be used as an educational opportunity in several ways.

According to a February 28 press release from the Massachusetts Ethics Commission, which has jurisdiction over local officials, a member of the Kingston Community Preservation Committee (CPC) participated in the making of a grant to a nonprofit organization for which she was the unpaid president. The grant was for the renovation of two boat sheds on the nonprofit's property, a river landing.

It's been over two years since I wrote about the indictments of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his father, and a city contractor. This morning, according to an article in the Detroit Free Press, the jury entered its verdicts. Kilpatrick was convicted on 24 of 30 counts, including five counts of extortion, racketeering, bribery and several mail, wire and tax fraud charges. The contractor was found guilty on nine of 11 counts, including racketeering and several counts of extortion.

Some very interesting issues arise out of a past (and present) conflict situation that has become an issue in this week's mayoral primary in the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, KS ("UG").

The conflict situation appears simple at first glance, but it is not. In 2007, a UG commissioner became the paid executive director of the Argentine Neighborhood Development Association ("ANDA"), a nonprofit Community Development Corporation and Community Housing Development Organization that has received funds from the UG. The executive director was paid, at least partially, out of those funds.

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 laws relating to council members, includingOntario's Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, are set up led to an extreme penalty and an ugly situation.

According to an article in the San Antonio Express-News this week, San Antonio's deputy city manager is concerned about whether he mishandled a conflict situation. It involved his participation on a bid review committee for a $300 million contract for an expansion to the city's convention center. While on the bid review committee, he interviewed for and accepted a job with a nonprofit whose focus is downtown development. The vice chair of the nonprofit is the CEO of one of the companies bidding for the expansion contract.

What does an official do when he recognizes that he has mishandled a conflict situation? What the deputy city manager decided to do was write a letter to the city's Ethics Review Board (ERB) asking it to determine whether he violated the city's ethics code. This was the right thing to do.