There's a lot of food for thought in the February 21 decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in the case Lodge No. 5 of the Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Philadelphia.

The suit was brought in order to end the prohibition on police officers making campaign contributions to local candidates directly or through a party or PAC, including the police union's own PAC. The suit was brought against the city and its ethics board, which had promulgated regulations based on the 1951 ordinance (see especially regulations 8.8 and 8.14).

The suit was based on First Amendment free speech and free association arguments, as well as a Fourteenth Amendment equal protection argument.

The last Congress is known for doing very little, but a couple of weeks ago it actually passed a bill that will have a serious effect on local government ethics: the Hatch Act Modernization Act of 2012 According to a press release on the bill, it "removes the federal prohibition on most state and local government employees who want to run for partisan political office. Under current law, state and local government employees may not run for partisan office if their job is connected to federal funding, a prohibition that prevents well-qualified candidates from serving their local communities. S. 2170 will strike this prohibition unless the employee’s salary is fully funded by federal dollars. The Hatch Act will continue to restrict state and local government employees from engaging in coercive conduct, or otherwise using their government positions to advance partisan political ends."

Here's an interesting political activity situation out of La Crosse County, Wisconsin. According to an article in the La Crosse Tribune last week, the county administrator was involved in supporting a referendum to give the city of La Crosse its own administrator. A city or county manager is not supposed to be involved in local politics, according to the ethics code of their own professional association, ICMA. But this issue was not in the county government, although it was in the county. And the administrator considers his support "promotion of my profession" rather than political activity.

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.