Here's the situation. There is a state ethics program that applies to local governments, and an ethics issue relating to a local law arises. There is no local ethics commission to enforce the local law, so what happens?

This is the situation in Cincinnati. The issue involves a charter provision that prohibits city funds from being disbursed for the purpose of a political campaign. This is usually an ethics matter (misuse of city property), but since there is no ethics commission in Cincinnati, three things happened when a council member put references on her website to her campaign (thereby making use of the city's broadband service), according to an article on Friday in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

It is important to take state laws into account when drafting ethics provisions, especially in local governments that do not have home rule charters. Here are two situations in the news where this was not done, and ethics reform has been undermined. Dealing with the state laws from the beginning could have made the ethics codes, and the ethics reform process, far better.

Just because it happens in New York City doesn't mean it will happen in the average city or, especially, town. Right? No, it can happen, only the numbers will probably be smaller. Two situations described in today's New York Times, both of them effectively centered on the hiring and failure to oversee consultants, are worth knowing about.

On December 6, according to an article on the Chicago Talks website, Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel promised that he would make many ethics reforms to “change the culture” of corruption and cronyism at City Hall.

Two months ago, a book was published called The Jersey Sting, by two Star-Ledger reporters, Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin. It provides the history of an enormous federal sting operation which led to the arrest of dozens of government officials, most of them from local governments, on July 23, 2009 (see my blog post of that date). It's a real page-turner that shows how things work and how easy it can be for anyone with money to make deals with elected officials, at least in New Jersey.

The actual sting operation is not really a local government ethics story, but rather a tale of an ethics environment that is so poor, criminal conduct is just waiting for the money to start it going.

If nothing else, this book should make it very clear to local government officials all over the country how valuable a good, independent ethics program is. The books shows very clearly what can happen when there is nothing to prevent an ethics environment from getting this bad.

In a letter to the editor in yesterday's New York Times, two lawyers who represent clients seeking to gut Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections public campaign financing program end by calling Arizona's program "a vision of unconstitutional dystopia, not free speech."

I administer the public campaign financing program in New Haven, CT. These programs are intended to prevent candidates from being seen to owe their election to special interests, including contractors and others doing business with government, as well as to prevent elected officials from actually feeling indebted to them. These goals are similar to the goals of government ethics laws. So let's try out what these gentlemen said by applying it to government ethics.