According to an
article in this week's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a rule
prohibiting Georgia state employees from accepting gifts over $25 is
not being enforced. At all.
How does the paper know these gifts are being made? Because lobbyists
have to disclose their spending on state employees as well as on
legislators (who are not restricted from taking such gifts). Governor...
Is there any worse way to skirt government ethics rules and misuse
public money and position than via a charitable organization? And yet
it
happens again and again. This time it happened in Baltimore, according
to the results of an extensive investigation
by the Baltimore Sun.
This week, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox announced
a "toolbox" for local governments to create local ethics policies.
Local government ethics is already governed by state statutes, but
local governments can apparently supplement these rules with local laws and ethics
boards. The toolbox consists of a ...
Here are two interesting local government ethics case studies from
matters in the news this week.
A Job Can Effectively Be a Gift
According to an
article in the Spokesman-Review,
a Spokane council member requested an advisory opinion from the city's
ethics committee after his
successful push to change city regulations to allow bus bench...
I've
talked about legal defense funds in the past as a way to accept
large gifts from those doing business with a local government, but I
referred, tangentially, to only one local government legal
defense fund, that of
former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. So I did some research and
came up with a few other examples, which are worth knowing about if the...
Possibly the most valuable annual local government ethics resource was
published this morning: Patricia Salkin's 2009 Ethical
Considerations in Land Use, a 28-page summary of reported cases and
opinions on ethics matters in land use situations. The 2008
edition focused on wind farm ethics in New York (also see my two blog
posts on this topic:...