"Trying to protect public officials from warrantless ethics complaints is a fruitless task; there will always be some who make outrageous claims about the behavior of those at city hall.

"Hiding such complaints from the public view, however, will not make them go away. It’s better for the public to learn who is crying wolf — along with those who have discovered a fox in the henhouse — than to shield such things under the cloak of secrecy and the notion of protecting reputations."

—Editorial in the Bainbridge Island (WA) Review, in response to a call by a council member to make ethics board proceedings more confidential.

Luis Toro, the director of Colorado Ethics Watch, raised an important local government ethics issue in a recent Huffington Post post. It is a problem that is not peculiar to Colorado. It is also a problem that could benefit from a government ethics approach.

Here is the problem in a nutshell: "Although the Open Records Act specifies a charge of only 25 cents per page for copies of documents, court decisions have allowed agencies to charge for research time in certain circumstances. The exception has grown to swallow the rule as government offices routinely charge fees for time spent responding to open records responses."

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).