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.

Music to my ears in an order yesterday from the federal court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, in a case involving an unsuccessful attempt by certain Wisconsin state legislators to claim the attorney-client privilege with respect to documents relating to redistricting. What resonates so nicely is the way the court considered state citizens to be the client of the private lawyer. Since they would, of course, be the client of a government lawyer as well, this decision would apply even more forcefully, but without the talk of "shamefulness," to documents discussed with government lawyers.

Newspapers aren't called the fourth estate for nothing. But in cities these days, they are more like the third estate, more important, that is, than the clergy. In fact, their investigations and editorials can bring down mayors, council presidents, even parties.

Local dailies may be losing money hand over fist, and weeklies, online papers, and blogs have taken away some of their power, but the dailies still have more power with respect to politicians and policies than anyone else.

We like to think of newspapers as run by the Benjamin Franklins and Bradlees of the world:  neutral, wise, and looking for a scoop. But newspaper owners can be seriously political, and often not in the European way of wearing their politics on their sleeves. This didn't use to be such a big problem, because cities had multiple dailies. Few do now.

The ownership of a city daily by individuals with powerful interests in the community to protect can lead one to thoughts of extending government ethics into the fourth estate. This is the case in Philadelphia, according to an article this week in the New York Times entitled "Interference Seen in Philadelphia Papers."

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.