Safra Working Papers

Here's a new role for an ethics commission:  mediator in a dispute between other government oversight offices. According to an article in the Advocate last week, New Orleans' ethics board has appointed two of its members to mediate in an ongoing dispute between the city's Inspector General and its new Independent Police Monitor.

Community outreach is usually toward the bottom of a local government ethics commission's priority list.

Government ethics e-newsletters are a good source of ideas, and something worth considering for your local government's ethics commission or ethics officer. Atlanta's new spring 2010 newsletter, Ethics Matters, is a good example of what such an e-newsletter can do.

Ethics Pledges

How often should ethics commissions meet?

The usual answer to that question is, As often as they need to. But how often is that?

That depends on their responsibilities. If all they do is respond to complaints and requests for advisory opinions, then they need only meet when they receive one or the other.

But what about ethics training? Even if they are not required to train or oversee training of local government officials and employees, they need to be trained themselves.

Update: March 1, 2010 (see below)

The political activity of ethics commission members, staff, and ethics officers is an important topic. The issue has arisen this week with respect to Connecticut's Office of State Ethics, according to Jon Lender's Government Watch column in yesterday's Hartford Courant.

This is the place to discuss the Ethics Commission's jurisdiction, powers, and duties.

This is the place to discuss the establishment and the role of an Ethics Commission. The most important issue here is an Ethics Commission's independence: how important it is and how best a municipality can achieve it. With respect to EC independence and competence, please share your thoughts or experiences regarding regional and state Ethics Commissions vs. municipal ECs.

The Washington state Legislative Ethics Board has been discussing how many meals a state legislator should be able to accept from lobbyists and lobbyist-employers under the "infrequent" meals exception in the state ethics code. The exception allows legislators to accept food and beverage when their attendance is "related to the performance of official duties" on "infrequent occasions." The board has apparently never defined "infrequent."

It's About Perceptions

A recent decision of the Wilton, NY ethics board (attached; see below) raises important issues regarding the selection of ethics commission members, their withdrawal from participation when they have a conflict, and the way an ethics commission handles allegations that are not covered by the ethics code.

Allegations That Do Not Constitute Violations

See Update Below
The accusations made by New York's Inspector General that the executive director of New York's Commission on Public Integrity leaked information about an investigation to a close associate of the target of the investigation (the governor) are very upsetting. But there are two important lessons to be learned here.

I recently read a book by Stanley Cavell called Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004). Despite its title, it is not about cities; in fact, much of the book uses movies to discuss this Harvard professor's ethical philosophy. What is relevant about this book to government ethics is Cavell's idea of "moral perfectionism," which isn't about being perfect, but about constantly seeking improvement in how one thinks and acts.

A favorite ploy in local government ethics is for a council to vote for an ethics code that includes an ethics commission, and then either not actually appoint members to the commission or, when they resign, not fill their seats, so that there is, effectively, no enforcement mechanism.

This is the place to provide opinions and recommendations regarding ethics education. Please suggest alternative language to what is below, and please share your experiences with ethics education, and how such experiences can be included in an ethics code, as well as other means to ensure that effective ethics training is provided. Other issues to discuss include who should receive ethics education, who should provide or be reponsible for the provision of ethics education, and how this education should be funded.

Independent agencies are more likely than regular government agencies to get into trouble, because they are usually more closed and less supervised. And yet officials too often listen to agencies' calls for independence from ethics programs, as if the "independence" meant something positive that should be respected, rather than that the agencies are unsupervised and unaccountable. An independent agency's independence is only something positive when it is a watchdog agency, like an ethics commission, auditor, or inspector general.

It's not easy to make ethics training enjoyable, so it's good to see how other people have tried. According to an article in Human Resource Executive, Cisco Systems came up with a parody of American Idol, with parody songs about ethics situations and three judges critically discussing each song/situation.

My second volume of summer reading is a classic, Dennis F. Thompson's Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption (1995). Despite the book's title, Thompson (a professor at Harvard) has a great deal to say about government ethics that is equally applicable to city and county legislators.

Looking at government ethics through the appearance standard, as Dennis Thompson did in his book Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption, reveals the great importance of independence to ethics advice and enforcement. No one is in a worse position to see appearances of impropriety than someone who considers his motives to be good, and his goals to be of utmost importance.

In his book Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption, Dennis Thompson discusses two tendencies that lead to the overlooking or obscuring of institutional corruption’s significance. Those who bring or judge charges tend to individualize misconduct. This limits the wrongdoing to the individual who is charged, exonerating other members of the legislative body, even if they are involved in similar conduct, and ignoring the local government's ethics