On Saturday, I attended a one-day conference on Institutional Corruption sponsored by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (videos of it will eventually appear here). Although local government was scarcely mentioned (there was one image of a painting that portrayed the 1930s machine in Kansas City, MO), many ideas that were discussed are applicable to local government ethics.

I will start with the ideas of Mark Warren, a professor at the University of British Columbia, not because he was the first or best speaker, but because, on the train to Boston, I read the online draft of his 2005 paper "Democracy Against Corruption" and found it fascinating. His talk at the conference presented some of the same ideas.

In November 2010, Broward County, FL voters approved an ethics code for officials of the cities in the county (the code also applies to the county commissioners). The code finally became effective January 2, 2012.

Three cities in Broward County (home to Ft. Lauderdale) have put referendum questions on the January 31 ballot seeking to strike the applicability of certain of the code's provisions to their cities' officials. The principal one is the requirement to disclose one's outside salary. Personally, I don't think disclosing a salary is necessary. It's sufficient to ask officials to say they are paid, say, more than $20,000 by an employer, or more than $5,000 by a client, to show that the job is serious and there is a financially meaningful relationship with a client.

What is notable about changing this particular provision is how self-serving it is for mayors to waste the public's time on a question that is only intended to protect their privacy. Of course, the argument is made that otherwise officials will resign in huge numbers. But if officials were to resign in huge numbers, the law would likely be changed. The fact is that disclosure requirements always lead to this argument, but rarely to the reality. When there were mass resignations in Oregon a couple of years ago (see my blog post), the officials either quickly were appointed again or others were appointed to replace them. The predictions did not come true, and the public did not suffer.

Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote an excellent op-ed piece for the New York Times last Sunday. It was about disclosure, more specifically about the way disclosure sometimes neither leads to more transparency, nor prevents what it is intended to prevent. In the government ethics situation, that would mean preventing misconduct.

Technical compliance, especially with the limited disclosure rules of local ethics codes, often provides little important information. We might know that an official owns more than 5% of Hometown Developers, but we don't know who owns the rest. Therefore, when one of the other owners comes before the official's board, there is no record of a special relationship between the owner and the official.

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.

One of the most damaging kinds of preferential treatment is one that is hard to pin on any one individual:  public works work done for some, but not for others, or done for some before being done for others. Whether or not this is done in any particular city or county, people talk about it, speculating that it is done, talking about things they've seen and heard. It's an important part of the perception that local government is run for those in government and those with political connections, and that the "important" areas of town (i.e., where the wealthy and powerful live) are favored.

And who is to say it's not happening? Denials are meaningless, explanations often futile.

Enter modern technology, more specifically GPS and online mapping. This is how, as of today, Chicago is dealing with suspicions that some areas of the city are being favored over others when it comes to the city's most important public works work:  snow plowing. The city has unveiled something it calls Plow Tracker on its Chicago Shovels page, which includes other relevant programs, such as Snow Corps, a way to lend a hand to neighbors who can't shovel their walks.

The situation of Rose Pak, a power broker for San Francisco's Chinese-American community who was featured a week ago in a New York Times article, raises some interesting questions. A paid consultant to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, she has never held public office. Nor has she ever registered as a lobbyist or been an official member of a campaign, even that of the Chinese-American man who was just elected mayor, Edwin Lee. According to the article, she has mobilized Chinese votes, volunteers, and contributions for a succession of mayors and city supervisors in return for city financing of social programs and building projects in Chinatown. She also helps Chinese-Americans get appointments in the city government, most notably Lee's appointment as interim mayor (he had been the city administrator).