Here's an interesting conflict situation from San Mateo County, CA. According to an article in yesterday's Almanac, prosecutors are investigating the selection by two school boards of a project architect for construction projects at the same time that the project architect was remodeling the house of a district official.

Here's an interesting conflict situation out of Forsyth County, Georgia. According to an article in the Forsyth News, a county commissioner owns a company that buys county water and sells it to county residents who used to have wells. The company owns the infrastructure that supplies water to four subdivisions in the county. It is one of several companies that do this. The companies are charged the flat commercial water rate, rather than residential rates that increase with use.

The question is, should the county commissioner participate in negotiations involving water contracts between the county and a city within the county, since the city would apparently be a water reseller, as well?

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions.

I would like to share one of these provisions that is truly worth thinking about. It appears in the Windsor, CO ethics code:

§5.2.M. No elected or appointed official or public body member shall offer or promise to give his or her vote or influence in favor of or against any proposed official action in consideration or upon condition that any other elected or appointed official, public body member, will promise or assent to give his or her vote or influence in favor of or against any other proposed official action.

Yet another brief has been filed in the Carrigan v. Commission on Ethics of the State of Nevada case, this time the EC's supplemental brief on remand to the Nevada Supreme Court.

The principal issue discussed in this brief is vagueness, which has stood in the background behind First Amendment issues of free speech and free association. The free speech arguments were put to rest by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the free association arguments were found not to have been originally raised, so they were dismissed.

In a blog post on the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, I discussed some of the issues raised in this brief, because they were discussed by the justices, even though their decision itself said nothing about vagueness, because the Nevada courts had not reached this issue. Now it will be discussed, and its discussion raises far more interesting and important issues than how the First Amendment applies to government ethics.

A lot of interesting issues have arisen with respect to Santa Fe's Ethics and Campaign Review Board.

A Majority of Lawyers on an Ethics Board
First, a new selection process was created, and the ethics board members were replaced some time between the July and August meetings. Instead of having council members individually select ethics board members, which was a terrible idea, now a local bar association selects 8 lawyers, from which the mayor appoints 4, plus 3 non-lawyers of his choice. The involvement of nonpartisan civic organizations in the selection of ethics board members is a great idea, but not (1) when there is only one such organization and (2) when it is required to select only lawyers.

Let's say you're a professional who wants to give something back to your community by serving on a city board or commission. You open up the newspaper and read that your mayor is saying, "It is not the five of us commissioners who make the city great. It's the citizens who are passionate about it, and now we're telling them, 'Sorry you can't serve.'"

Or the mayor is saying, "On certain boards we require professional experience. With what is now required by the Ethics Commission, these same professionals are feeling they can't run the risk of making a mistake and being possibly thrown in jail."

Suddenly, sitting on a nonprofit board looks really good, at least in Palm Beach County, where many municipal officials have opposed the new ethics code.