Last December, I listed the major recommendations of Philadelphia's Task Force on Ethics and Campaign Finance Reform in its 58-page report.

According to an article in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer, just three months later, fifteen of seventeen city council members have co-sponsored a series of ethics reform bills. That sounds like good, fast work that deserves some serious applause.

But there are some big question marks. One is that none of the bills are available online. Each bill is given a bill-less page (1  2  3  4   5; also see the March 4 council minutes for a full list of the bills and sponsors), and in one case there is even a link to a bill, but the link doesn't work. So I am dependent, for now, on what I read in the newspaper.

Update: March 1, 2010 (see below)

The political activity of ethics commission members, staff, and ethics officers is an important topic. The issue has arisen this week with respect to Connecticut's Office of State Ethics, according to Jon Lender's Government Watch column in yesterday's Hartford Courant.

Last week, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley responded to the conviction of yet another alderman by proposing (i) that the Inspector General's office oversee the city's hiring program for fairness, instead of the Office of Compliance the mayor set up in 2007; (ii) that the IG's office take jurisdiction over the council (whose members are called "aldermen") and their staff, something the council rejected twenty years ago, and ever since; (iii) that city workers and contractors who fail to report corrupt activity be punished; (iv) that the IG office's investigative reports be posted online, minus the names of those involved; and (v) that the IG's office get a guaranteed minimum budget. Click here to see a video of the mayor's proposal.

Update: February 19, 2010 (see below)

This blog post is about Chicago, and things are more complicated in Chicago than in other American municipalities. So please read slowly and carefully.

According to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, the first deputy in the mayor's Office of Compliance resigned a few weeks after he and the office's executive director were found by the city's inspector general to have mishandled a 2008 sexual harassment complaint (e.g., they tried to find the accused another city job). The IG recommended that the mayor suspend the two men for thirty days without pay.

It's not an unfamiliar story. Council candidates promise ethics reform. They are elected, and actually fulfill their promises with a proposed ethics ordinance. But there's not really much to the proposed ethics ordinance, and there's no enforcement mechanism.

This is what is happening in Yorba Linda (pop. 71,000), just outside Anaheim. The proposed ethics ordinance has few provisions, most of them involving campaign finance and city contractors and developers.

Political activity by local government employees can be a sign of misuse of office. And when election problems arise, they generally involve local government employees, as has happened in Essex County (NJ; home of Newark), according to an article in Friday's Star-Ledger.

The principal problem with political activity involves patronage, the system whereby officials make it a requirement of being hired for a job that the employee work for the election of certain candidates. The classic case is Chicago, where even a federal order to institute serious obstacles to the patronage system were, for years, undermined by fraudulent conduct.