Safra Working Papers

The Council on Governmental Ethics Laws has great instincts for meeting where the ethics problems are greatest. Last year it met in Chicago. This year it will be Maricopa County, AZ (the Phoenix area).

See update below

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts related to bringing false charges against other county officials over a period of years, according to an article in yesterday's Arizona Republic.

Here's an ugly little case study, based on an ethics complaint filed in September in Hillborough County, the county which includes Tampa. According to the complaint (attached; see below), the county administrator wanted to give herself and the county attorney a 1% salary increase. Salary increases in the county must be approved by the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC). The county administrator asked the county attorney if the raises would be legal without such approval, and the county attorney said they would be, because it was a benefit all county employees were entitled to receive.

When the entire ethics commission of a major county resigns, something is seriously wrong. This is what recently happened in Jackson County, MO, home of Kansas City and Independence.

Although in 2008, Orange County, Florida's Ethics and Campaign Finance Reform Task Force recommended (report attached; see below) that the county have an ethics board selected by a variety of community organizations, following the model of Miami/Dade County, and Section 2-457 of the county ordinances did provide for (with liberal use of the magic word "may") an ethics advisory board to be selected by the chief judge of the local circuit, Orange County does not appear to have an ethics board.

The Internet provides all sorts of opportunities for both transparency and citizen feedback. One way, which I pointed out recently, is for local government officials to have blogs that allow them to present their news and views, and allow citizens to respond and ask questions.

Two other approaches have just been taken by towns near where I live.

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

One of the best ways to create a more ethical environment in local government is to have more people run for office. The more people who run for office, the more pressure is put on the closed world that many local governments preserve. This closed world is preserved through the lack of interest not only of voters, but also of potential candidates, who feel the only way to get elected is to know the right people in the right way.

Here's a good-news story from Delray Beach, FL. But first the bad news.

Two months ago, I pointed out Patricia Salkin's new summary of 2009 reported cases dealing with ethical aspects of local government land use matters. I'm finally getting around to analyzing one of them that provides a fascinating perspective on why conflicts of interest are important.

I hate to harp so often on the problem of ethics matters being handled by criminal authorities, but when I read an article in the Nogales (AZ) International that begins as follows, I get angry.

While there was “ample evidence of incompetence,” it took more than two years for Nils Urman, former Santa Cruz County Commerce and Economic Development Director, to be cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and the state auditor gen

I recently wrote a blog post about a false statements in elections law in Ohio, and the problems with enforcing such laws. I have often written about the problems with self-enforcement of ethics laws. In the Wisconsin case of a state supreme court justice's misrepresentations in an election ad, the two have come together, big-time. The result is far more injurious, even crippling, to public trust in the judiciary than the original misrepresentations.

Back in May, I wrote about the conflict of interest problems in upstate New York local governments due to the development of wind farms in the area. This week, New York's Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, issued a Wind Industry Ethics Code to deal with these problems. Hats off to Cuomo for the idea, although not for the execution.

David A. Marcello, the Executive Director of the Public Law Center at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, has been keeping close tabs on New Orleans' troubled ethics program. In 2011, he published a report on how Hurricane Katrina (2005) led New Orleans' officials to turn a moribund ethics program into one of the best local government ethics programs in the U.S., at least on paper.

An essential problem in many local governments is a lack of transparency. When people do not know what is happening, and access to information is very difficult, democracy is undermined in several ways. Reformers have a difficult time showing what is actually happening or preparing for public meetings and public hearings. Newspapers are dependent on what officials say. Ordinary citizens become indifferent or completely turned off when all news is of the he said-she said variety. Where there is little transparency, there is usually a reason to keep things hidden.

Are loans to businesses that do business with a city sufficient to create a conflict of interest? This is the question that has been batted around recently in Washington, D.C., according to an article in today's Washington Post.

Here's an interesting conflict question. According to an article in the Tewksbury Patch this week, a special town meeting in Tewksbury, MA will soon vote on whether to go to referendum on the question of replacing the town meeting with a council.

According to an article yesterday in the Rockdale Citizen, Rockdale County, GA's county commission is having a debate on how to select its three-member ethics board and its alternates. Unfortunately, it's a debate that is being waged with no reference to best practices and almost no outside professional input. It's as if a debate about a construction project were to include little input from or reference to the work of engineers or planners.

I think it's safe to say that a local government ethics "first" has occurred in Montgomery County, Maryland. A transgendered council aide has filed a complaint against the county ethics commission on the grounds that the EC investigated her because of her gender identity, according to an article in yesterday's Gazette.

See 1/16/09 addendum at bottom The dream of every machine politician is to have his city controlled by those who work for him. Unfortunately, every city has citizens who don’t work for the city administration. Or so I thought until I learned about Vernon, California. Vernon is “an exclusively industrial city,” which is a fancy term for one big conflict of interest. Here’s how it works, according to the Economist and a wonderful fictional dialogue by public administration professor H.

What do you do when you are not the only member of your immediate family who is an elected official? This question arose in Frederick County, MD, the home of Camp David.