With the frequent confusion of person and office, sometimes it's not that easy to tell the difference between a gift to a local government agency and a gift to its director. This confusion can open an agency director to accusations of ethical misconduct.

This is what has happened in Baltimore. According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, the city comptroller accepted the pro bono services of a firm whose most prominent member is the owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, in other words, a major player in city politics. The legal services are for a suit against the mayor, alleging that a large telephone contract was not competitively bid.

I recently wrote a blog post about a situation where a citizen asked an ethics commission for ethics advice when council members failed to do so and, despite the corporation counsel's suggestion that it provide the advice, the ethics commission refused to provide it.

In this post, I would like to consider the matter about which the citizen sought advice. The matter involved the appropriateness of council members affiliated with a church participating in a matter that involved funding for renovation of a wall along the church's parking lot. If the council voted to do the renovation, it would expend tax dollars to improve the church's property. The church would not receive any money, but since the wall apparently needs fixing, the decision would save church members from having to pay to fix the wall.

Last week, a resident from one of the towns next to mine (Wallingford, CT) called me for advice regarding his request for an advisory opinion. The request involved the appropriateness of council members affiliated with a church participating in a matter that involved funding for renovation of a wall along the church's parking lot. This is a difficult conflict situation, but some town officials made it much more complicated than it had to be. Not only did the ethics board, mayor, and council show a lack of understanding of government ethics, but sadly, none of them seemed to want to gain an understanding.

When the matter involving the church’s wall first came before the council, the resident asked council members affiliated with the church to seek an advisory opinion on whether they had a conflict. When they failed to do so, he asked the ethics board for an advisory opinion. The ethics board said it had no authority to provide an advisory opinion to a citizen. The resident went to the corporation counsel, who suggested that the council members seek an advisory opinion. The council members did not do so.

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.

Local government ethics can quickly become an ugly circus when officials don't really understand it. A good example occurred in Royal Oak, Michigan last week, when a city commissioner who had recently pointed out a legitimate conflict situation involving a fellow commissioner took an "ethics pledge" at a commission meeting, without any warning, and then asked that the commissioners agree to take the pledge at the beginning of every meeting, according to an article in the Observer & Eccentric. Here's the pledge:

A number of important issues arise from a case before the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board (ECDB) last week. The issues include: (1) how to treat an inadequate complaint; (2) how to treat a complainant in a proceeding, and (3) what to do when an ethics code and rules may be inadequate to a situation where there is a strong appearance of impropriety.