My most recent blog post involved ethics commission confidentiality. This one involves the other side of the coin:  ethics commission transparency.

I often send blog posts to officials I write about, hoping that they will enter into dialogue about the issue, privately or online, or at least learn something from what I've written. Most local government officials now make their e-mail addresses available online. But, sadly, most local government ethics commission members and even their staff do not.

It's Attack the Ethics Commission week once again, this time in New York State. According to an April 16 article in the Albany Times-Union, a mayor from one party filed a complaint against the deputy majority leader of the New York Senate, who is a member of the other party. The complaint is included below the article, and a statement by the mayor, about the filing, is quoted.

Fast forward to May 15, when the senate majority leader accused the state ethics commission of leaking the commission's letter to the respondent. What important information could possibly be in the letter to the respondent that was not already in the complaint?

There has been a controversy (which I missed when it originally arose a few months ago) regarding what Mitt Romney and his aides did with their government computer hard drives when Romney left office as governor of Massachusetts. According to an article in the Boston Globe, Romney and his aides purchased 17 hard drives, for $65 each, and "wiped the server for the governor’s office and replaced the remaining computers in the office." The result was that all of the governor's office's electronic communications disappeared.

Romney did what nearly every elected official does when an ethics issue arises:  he said, “They all followed the law exactly as it’s written.” Let's assume that's true. Let's assume that government officials in Massachusetts passed a law or regulation that allows a governor and his aides to take all their electronic communications with them when they leave office.

One of the most damaging aspects of ethical misconduct in government is that it decreases the amount of citizen participation in government activities. People feel that their local government is rigged to help politicians and their families, friends, and business associates. It's not worth spending time getting involved in a rigged system, unless your goal is to be part of the in crowd.

It was nice to read an article in this Sunday's New York Times about a solution to a problem I've written about in the past:  the New York city council's discretionary funds (often referred to as "slush funds"), which have sometimes been given to organizations run by people with special relationships to council members. The solution – in an experimental stage – is not oversight, but citizen participation (see another blog post on an oversight approach to the same problem).

ProPublica ran an excellent article yesterday by Kim Barker and Al Shaw about campaign, PAC, and Super PAC coordination and self-dealing, primarily at the presidential level. What is so special about the article is that it follows the money to where it is being spent. The authors found that many PAC and Super PAC vendors are the same vendors, or different vendors owned by the same people, as the presidential campaigns'. In other words, presidential consultants are also PAC consultants or vendors.

This is also a problem at the local level, especially with local public financing programs, where coordination with PACs is less of an issue (the money is spent on other campaigns). What is prohibited is the taking of funds from PACs. What happens instead is that PACs sometimes pay a candidate's consultants and other vendors, including landlords and utilities when they share an office.

But that's only one of the ways local candidates use vendors to get around prohibitions and limitations.

I never know where I'm going to find something that inspires a blog post on local government ethics. This time it was an essay by Tim Parks in the March 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, as well as on the NYRBlog. The essay is about Italy, and the possibility for change in its government, economy, and culture. Parks, a British novelist and once literary translator from Italian into English who has lived in Italy for many years, notes two things about Italian political culture that resonated with me here in the U.S.

One aspect of Italian culture that Parks noted was "a tendency in general to foment and then thrive on a gap between the official version of events and their actual course, between rules and practice, appearance and reality." This isn't exactly lying. It's something much more serious, because it is more pervasive and insidious. A lie is something limited. For example, saying you've cut taxes when you've increased the mill rate. What Parks is referring to is a cultural norm where nothing that is said is actually true, where written rules aren't followed in practice, where what you see is never what you get.