Safra Working Papers

Many municipal ethics codes have a provision similar to this one: Contingent Fees No official or employee may retain, or be retained by, anyone to solicit or secure a contract with the town upon an agreement or understanding that includes a commission, percentage, brokerage, or contingent fee, except with respect to attorneys hired to represent the town on a common contingency fee basis. I had never thought twice about the exception for attorneys who work on a contingency fee basis until I read Adam Liptak's column in today's New York Times.

Four years after I wrote a blog post entitled The Ethics of Today's Municipal Pension Plan Problems, according to an op-ed piece in the New York Times, New Jersey agreed with the S.E.C. never again to fraudulently hide

We are told in school that one of the reasons the American Revolution happened is that colonists faced taxation without representation. This is just about as bad as it gets. But there is also such a thing as representation without taxation. How bad is that? What effect does it have on government and, more particularly, on government ethics?

One of the most frustrating problems many cities and counties face is all that untaxable land owned by nonprofit organizations. Some states, such as my state, Connecticut, pay local governments part of what they lose out in property taxes, but when things are hard, as now, and the taxes are most sorely needed, there's less in the kitty to hand out.

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions.

I would like to share one of these provisions that is truly worth thinking about. It appears in the Windsor, CO ethics code:

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, the New York Governor’s Task Force on Public Authorities Reform has filed its report (not yet available online) on the implementation of the Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009, whose provisions are summarized in a separate document.

A recent City Ethics blog post discusses the value of a functional definition of a government employee with respect to government ethics. That is, a private individual who does government work for the government has the same obligations to the community as a government employee.