Safra Working Papers

Recusal is a touchy subject for government officials, for two principal reasons. One, withdrawing from a matter can appear to constitute an admission of misconduct. This is because so many people, and even ethics codes, consider it wrong to have a conflict. Actually, recusing oneself is a way of dealing responsibly with a conflict, and is the opposite of misconduct.

Update below:
The controversy in Baltimore over the mayor's acceptance of gifts from a developer whose companies have received a great deal of funding from the city appears now to be focused on whether or not the mayor was required to disclose these gifts, since the developer did not personally do business with the city.

According to an article in the Jacksonville Times-Union this week, former Jacksonville council member and current lobbyist Ginny Myrick said, in response to lobbying reforms suggested by Jacksonville ethics officer, and City Ethics' president, Carla Miller, that (not exact words) "it is important for exact payments from clients to remain protected because the information is proprietary.

The word is out:  if local government officials don't want to file financial disclosure statements, all they have to do is resign en masse and whoever wrote the ethics code will not only rewrite it, but will say all sorts of warm, wonderful things about them.

Update: September 26, 2010 (see below)

Disclosure forms are important. Sometimes, even secondary information can be important. But it can take a lot of work to get behind the information that appears on disclosure forms. And when you do get behind the information, it can look real ugly, even if it's completely legal.

According to an editorial yesterday in the Luzerne County (PA) Citizens Voice, the Luzerne County council, on advice of the county attorney, is planning to hold an executive session tomorrow to discuss changes to its ethics code. The editorial says it would be wrong to hold an executive session.

Is there an ethical requirement to discuss matters that are not being discussed? Dan Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, refers to something he calls the Four Attentional Rules. 'In any group, from the family, to organizations, to entire societies, there are these unstated rules that we learn tacitly about the questions that can't be asked.' Click here to read the rest of this blog entry. The Four Attentional Rules are as follows: 1. Here's what we notice 2. Here's what we call it 3. Here's what can't be noticed 4.

Hidden in the middle of Question 2 on the New York City ballot this week are two important changes in the city's conflicts of interest law (to my knowledge, the nation's only aptly named ethics code). The current conflicts of interest section of the city charter can be found at pp. 319 ff.

We have something more than a credit crisis. We have a governance crisis. According to the new Gallup Governance poll, only 26% of Americans are satisfied with the way this nation is being governed. In 2002, the number was 59%. As recently as early 2007, the number was 42%. This is a bigger drop than the stockmarket. Perhaps our nation belongs in moral bankruptcy court. The last time 74% of Americans were dissatisfied with their government was after Watergate.

Gov. Sarah Palin's national fame has brought government ethics complaints to the attention of people who had never paid any attention to them. And the result has, in general, been one of distortion rather than education. The latest news has especially distorted the nation's view of government ethics: the argument that defending against frivolous ethics complaints was too costly in dollars and time, and therefore damaging to the state and the people of Alaska, so damaging that the governor resigned her position.

Last week, I wrote about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision invalidating a Montgomery County's ethics code to the extent it applied to the employees of independent agencies, such as the district attorney's office.

In a recent blog post on the new Michigan Model Local Government Ethics Ordinance, I noted in passing that the model wrongfully made divulging confidential information a violation even when it benefits no one, and that this is not a government ethics issue.

Lawyer-legislators are extremely creative people. The latest use of their creativity is to argue that ethics boards cannot require disclosure of a conflict of interest that arises from legal representation because they have no jurisdiction over the practice of law. Only the state Supreme Court has that jurisdiction.

Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about gifts and reciprocity, based on a classic anthropological work, Lewis Hyde's The Gift.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article based on a long-term investigation of group homes for the developmentally disabled in New York state. It found that "in hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses and, in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state." It sounds as if officials were following the Catholic Church's handling of its abuse cases.

Note: This blog post was posted on September 22, and I accidentally deleted it. This is a reposting.

What is recusal? More to the point, does the act of recusal require merely inaction, or action, or action and words? This has become an issue in the city of Santa Fe, but it is important to establish a definition for the purpose of government ethics.

Campaign finance is an area of municipal ethics that is often treated as a separate field entirely. But they’re closely related. Both involve the conflict between private and public interest, and especially gifts to elected officials. The principal difference is that campaign contributions are a perfectly legal way of giving to elected officials, which makes the problem a bit more complex. I began administering the public campaign financing program in New Haven, Connecticut last year.

Possibly the most important single thing in government ethics is the recognition that just because something isn't required, it doesn't mean you can't do it, and that just because something is not expressly prohibited, it doesn't mean you can do it. This is an expanded version of what I've often talked about:  that, unlike most laws, ethics laws are minimum requirements.

The Grants of a Conflicted Board of Insiders
Sometimes conflicts can cause a city or county serious problems with such things as state and federal grants. This is what has happened in Brockton, MA (pop. 94,000), according to an article in the Enterprise-News.