Here are three instances of ethics reform that, I hope, would not happen if someone involved had read the chapter on ethics reform in my Local Government Ethics Program book.

The Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force report was published yesterday. Well, at least Part 1 was published. As I said in my blog post about the announcement of the task force's creation, "four months, including the holiday season, is a short time for four people and their likely inexperienced lawyers to deal with a huge city's ethics program."

The task force managed to draft an 83-page report in a little less than five months, which is a major feat. The report reflects a great amount of research and contains a lot of good ideas. But the report does not present a vision of a comprehensive ethics program for Chicago. It merely makes recommendations, 34 of them to be precise.

It looks like outsourcing may finally come to local government ethics. No, this doesn't mean that a city's hotline will be picked up by someone in India (in fact, hotlines in some localities are already outsourced to corporations). What it means is that the ongoing failure of scandal-ridden San Bernardino County (CA) to come up with an ethics program (see my blog posts on this) has finally been accepted as part of its government's nature. So, according to an article in the Press-Enterprise this week, the county supervisors have decided to outsource the county's ethics program to the state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC). And the FPPC has agreed to take on the job, applying the laws for state officials and employees to those in the county (the FPPC also has ethics provisions relating to local officials and employees, but it generally does not enforce them itself).

Here's an interesting conflict question. According to an article in the Tewksbury Patch this week, a special town meeting in Tewksbury, MA will soon vote on whether to go to referendum on the question of replacing the town meeting with a council. The question is whether the elected town meeting moderator, who gets a $450 stipend for his work, has a conflict that will require him not to moderate the special town meeting, because he has a financial interest in preserving the town meeting and, therefore, his stipend.

“The concern with potential corruption does not stop just because the relationship has entered the bedroom.’’

For those of you who think my blog needs a little spice, this is a good ice breaker. These are the words of Kathay Feng, head of California Common Cause, spoken at a meeting of the Fair Political Practices Commission, California's state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over local officials and employees (quoted from yesterday's PolitiCal column in the Los Angeles Times). The issue was a proposal to allow officials in a “dating relationship’’ with a lobbyist to accept and not disclose “personal benefits commonly exchanged between people on a date or in a dating relationship.’’

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.