Safra Working Papers

What can a local official do when he is required to withdraw from a matter that involves a close personal friend who's in hot water due to that official's feud with another official? What do you do when you're caught between a rock and a hard place? The district attorney of Putnam County, NY is faced with this odd and difficult mix of personal and public obligations, at least if what he is saying is true.

Is discomfort with a centralized ethics program by various parts of a local government something that should stand in the way of creating one? According to an article in the New Haven Register last week, this has been suggested in a discussion by the board of selectmen of Madison, CT, a town about a half hour's drive from where I live.

David Brooks' column in the New York Times today is about two views of character, the philosophers' and psychologists' views. He too simply portrays the philosophers' view as involving ingrained character traits, which is sadly how most people seem to view character. I would call this the mythological view of character.

Lobbyists, lawmakers, and charitable fundraising form a triangle that is both virtuous and harmful. Community leaders like to be identified with charitable groups, and charitable groups like to be identified with community leaders. It's a natural combination. But what is not natural, or even easy to see, is the line between charitable fundraising and campaign fundraising, when lobbyists, contractors, and developers enter into the picture. The typical problem involves a mayor's favorite charity.

"I believe that an alderman's office is a political office," said Chicago alderman Suarez, one of 50 aldermen to get their expense allowances doubled last year, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune.

Update: January 4, 2010 (see below)

On December 15, Chicago published a Compliance and Integrity Survey that its Office of Compliance commissioned from the Ethics Resource Center, a primarily corporate ethics and compliance research organization.

The Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force report was published yesterday. Well, at least Part 1 was published. As I said in my blog post about the announcement of the task force's creation, "four months, including the holiday season, is a short time for four people and their likely inexperienced lawyers to deal with a huge city's ethics program."

The creation of an ethics task force is a popular way for local government leaders to pursue ethics reform. It provides the appearance of community involvement and independence, and it means that reform ideas are not something to be imposed by a mayor on council members and other officials, which can cause a great deal of resentment.

A former head of Chicago's public school system has said she will plead guilty to a scheme to take hundreds of thousands of dollars, airfare, meals, and baseball tickets in exchange for steering more than $23 million in no-bid contracts to her former employer, an educational consulting and training company.

The second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force came out this week (see my posts on the first report and on the ordinances passed in response to it).

The principal topic of the second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force is the relationship between the Board of Ethics and the city's dual inspectors general, one for the executive branch (the IG) and a new one for the legislative branch (the LIG). Currently, there are communication and jurisdictional problems among these three agencies.

Ethics program independence is, as far as I'm concerned, the single most important issue in ethics reform. Nothing gains the public's trust as much as an ethics program that is independent from the officials over whom it has jurisdiction.

Although the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force, in its first report, came out strongly in favor of more transparency in government, in its second report it came out strongly in favor of what it calls "confidentiality" in the ethics program. I call it what the public calls it: "secrecy."

The worst recommendation in the Chicago ethics task force's second report (attached; see below) involves the role it wants the corporation counsel to play in the city's ethics program: prosecuting attorney.

I feel strongly that a corporation counsel's office should play no role in an ethics program. See the section of my book Local Government Ethics Programs on the involvement of local government attorneys in an ethics program.

When a mayor replaces an entire ethics commission, it usually means that he is taking over control of the city's ethics program, to protect himself and his allies. This doesn't appear to be the case in Chicago, where today Mayor Emmanuel replaced ethics board members whose terms had ended or were about to end, and whose other members had been asked to resign, according to an article in today's Chicago Sun-Times.

The Schumpeter column in this week's Economist talks about the corporate chief legal officer (CLO), who due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's requirements has become a major figure at the top of every big corporation. Much as the city or county attorney is a major figure at the top of every local government.

Do Chinese walls (that is, mechanisms that separate someone from information or involvement in a matter) work in conflict situations in government? And what considerations determine whether they work or not?

I recently wrote a blog post about a situation where a citizen asked an ethics commission for ethics advice when council members failed to do so and, despite the corporation counsel's suggestion that it provide the advice, the ethics commission refused to provide it.