Safra Working Papers

It's valuable to put government ethics in the larger context of the use of public office for private purposes that does not involve a financial benefit for anyone. In other words, much of politics is personal. A review in this weekend's New York Times Book Review got me thinking about this.

Updates: November 28, 2009 (see below, with December 23 correction)

When a local government official co-owns a company, is it enough to create a separate company owned solely by another co-owner to do business with the official's city?

(Note: This post has been revised, based on a response from Steve Berlin, executive director of Chicago's ethics board. I had made the silly assumption that the underlined language in the ethics reform ordinance was new. It turns out that much of that language has been there for some time. So I've deleted some comments and made changes to others.)

A dispute in Kansas raises the question:  which takes precedence, the First Amendment (free speech) or the Second Amendment?

On July 1, 2013, a Kansas state law became effective that prohibited the use of state funds to pay for promotion or lobbying on gun control legislation or regulation at any governmental level.

Update: April 29, 2010 (see below)

The idea of a possible conflict of interest should not be an excuse for a fishing expedition to find relationships between local government legislators and people or contracts they vote on. This appears to be what is happening in Crossville, a town of 9,000 in east-central Tennessee.

One of the rarely questioned truisms of local government ethics is, "One size does not fit all." Usually this means that one ethics code is not right for every city or county, that every jurisdiction has its own issues and problems.

In some ways this is true. New York City's huge ethics program is hardly appropriate to a small town, because there is such a large difference in available resources. But there is no difference when it comes to ethics rules or the need for training or independent advice and enforcement.

Lax post-employment provisions can come back to haunt high-level officials. They may have been thinking of their futures and those of their close colleagues when they opposed laws that would require them not to represent anyone before the government for a year or two after leaving public service. But when one of their close colleagues takes advantage of the resulting hole in the post-employment provision and becomes a lobbyist, it reflects poorly on the high-level official in two ways.

This is the last of four blog posts on Florida Senate Bill 606 (attached; see below), one of the worst ethics reform bills I have ever read.

Cheryl Forchilli, chair of the Florida Commission on Ethics (which deals with local government ethics), wrote a must-read op-ed piece that appeared on the Florida Thinks blog yesterday.

Forchilli's piece begins with a nice simile:

Florida Senate Bill 606 (attached; see below) is one of the worst ethics reform bills I have ever read. But it is far worse than the words it consists of. What makes it worse is that, with respect to laws that affect local officials, it is largely the work of the Florida League of Cities (this was confirmed to me by representatives of both the League and state senator Jeff Clemens, the bill's sponsor).

This is the second of four blog posts on Florida Senate Bill 606 (attached; see below), one of the worst ethics reform bills I have ever read (click here to read the first post, which focused on a provision that provides an additional penalty on complainants in order to reduce the number of ethics complaints).

Gift Reporting vs. Gift Banning

This is the third of four blog posts on Florida Senate Bill 606 (attached; see below), one of the worst ethics reform bills I have ever read.

At the very end of last year, a grand jury filed a report that found a great deal of corruption in Florida's state and local governments, and made numerous recommendations for ethics reform (see my blog post on the report). This provided the perfect opportunity for improving ethics programs across the state.

City Ethics' president and Jacksonville ethics officer, Carla Miller, is taking best practices to a new level in Florida. She is organizing a statewide local government ethics swap meeting, where local government ethics officials will share information and talk about swapping software and programs.

When Mayor John Peyton decided to hire Carla Miller as Jacksonville’s Ethics Officer in 2007, the city was in crisis. A grand jury was investigating violations of state open-meeting laws by nearly every member of the former City Council. The FBI had begun sniffing around JaxPort, probing dubious contracts and allegations of influence peddling. The city had spent $36.5 million to develop the old Shipyards site, with nothing to show for it. It had spent another $26.8 million on the courthouse with similar results.

BY SUSAN COOPER EASTMAN

February 3, 2009

Here's an interesting conflict situation from Louisiana that involves a good intra-governmental revolving door provision and unforeseen circumstances. According to an article today in the Advocate, the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board made the wise decision to ask the state ethics board, which has jurisdiction over local officials, whether it could hire the city's deputy mayor as its executive director.

Gerald Ford's passing revives the memory of one of the least remembered parts of the story of the Watergate affair: the pardon of Richard Nixon. Remembering the pardon is important because it shows two important things about government ethics enforcement. First, how ethics rules are enforced is more important than the rules themselves.

Form of government issues are not generally considered to be part of government ethics.  But they are intertwined in important ways.

This can be seen from the New York City Council slush fund scandal.  According to an article in today's New York Times, it began when the Board of Estimate, a finance board in charge of writing the budget, was abolished in the charter revision of 1989.  This gave control of the budget to the Council.

It's always nice to see clever, simple, effective forms of disclosure that convey the most important information in the most readable, quickly understandable way. Such a form of disclosure is suggested in a paper published a month ago by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, and summarized in an Election Law Blog post that ran yesterday.

Since most local ethics commissions do not have the authority to initiate their own investigations or draft their own complaints (although in many cases this authority is not expressly withheld), there is a special role that former EC members, especially chairs, can play:  filing complaints that no one else will file.