San Marcos (TX) Council candidate Toby Hooper, in his first public statement as a candidate, said some of the right things about ethics:

On the role of an ethics commission (he's a member of the city's ethics review commission):

Lack of transparency and voter indifference, especially relating to technical issues, are often considered minor issues not central to local government ethics. What happened the last few years in Bell, California (pop. 37,000; Los Angeles County) should make people think again about how central transparency and citizen participation are to preventing unethical conduct by local government officials.

Recently, I wrote a blog post on the political use of ethics complaints and the manipulation of the press. Yesterday, the third circuit court of appeals effectively, and I think wrongly, disagreed with one of my principal arguments in that post, and therefore came to the wrong decision.

There's a good opinion piece by Austin American-Statesman columnist Jason Embry this week on the political use of ethics complaints. The instances of abuse of the ethics process is what has led many jurisdictions to prohibit any mention of filing an ethics complaint and to prohibit the filing of ethics complaints within sixty or so days of an election.

A situation in the city of Alameda, CA once again points out that government officials dealing with the possibly unethical conduct of other government officials is not a good thing.

According to an article today in the San Francisco Chronicle, the city of Alameda asked the city's outside counsel to investigate whether a council member had disclosed confidential information to a developer and others against the interests of the city, and had effectively held a council meeting via e-mail in contravention of the state's open meetings law. And yesterday the counsel's report was made public by the city council, and the matter was turned over to the D.A.'s office.

The great majority of what is written about legislative redistricting focuses on state and federal redistricting. But many cities, even some towns, have districts too, and resetting district boundaries is an important political process designed to prevent public participation and to undermine public trust.

In January, an advisory board of experts and representatives of good government groups got together to articulate principles of transparency in the redistricting process. A short document has just been published, which summarizes the principles identified during that meeting, focusing on data and software, rather than, for example, public hearings and open meetings. The summary is valuable not only for local government redistricting, but for all sorts of transparency (e.g., budgets and developments), because it takes into account the latest technology, including geographic information software and open-source software.