Safra Working Papers | City Ethics

Ethics Commissions & Administration April 4, 2012

Beyond the Criminal Enforcement Paradigm: Dealing with Unwritten Rules

I have written about the need for ethics commissions to go beyond the criminal enforcement paradigm, which limits commissions to determining whether an individual respondent has violated an ethics provision or not. It is hard to find instances of a commission looking at the bigger picture, that is, at the common practices and unwritten rules that underlie an individual's ethical misconduct.

Conflicts of Interest December 3, 2009

Bias Is Not a Conflict

Is it a conflict for a council member to be an officer of a neighborhood association? This issue arose recently in Tulsa, according to an article this week in the Tulsa World.

October 1, 2012

Bid Rigging, Organized Crime, and State Takeover of Cities

According to an article in last week's Economist, last year 22 local councils in Italy were disbanded and taken over by the national government due to alleged infiltration by organized crime. This is an extreme way to deal with a poor local government ethics environment. But it's a very difficult problem for a local government to deal with.

March 2, 2011

Big Questions Arise from Cook County Assessor's Refusal to Abide by Campaign Finance Ordinance

Cook County assessor Joseph Berrios is becoming a regular character in this blog (see below for prior posts on him). This time he is declaring unconstitutional a law passed by the county to limit his fundraising from lawyers who appeal property tax assessments. And he has the support of a questionable opinion from the local state's attorney, according to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday.

December 1, 2008

Birmingham Mayor/Former Jefferson County Executive Arrested -- Gifts Central

Type the word "ethics" into the Birmingham, AL website search box and nothing comes up. Nor can you find the city's ordinances. Mayor Larry Langford bills himself as a great reformer, but he certainly hasn't done anything to reform the city's ethics laws, or at least to let anyone know about them. In fact, according to the City Ethics site, the ethics ordinance and board used to be on the city website, but the links no longer work.

March 21, 2007

Bitterness Instead of Understanding

No Retreat, No Surrender: One Man's Fight.' If only this were the title of a civil rights leader's memoir. But no civil rights leader would talk about 'one' man's fight; it was a group effort. Only someone who falsely sees himself as walking into a sunset alone after a gunfight would use that subtitle for his memoir. The memoir is Tom DeLay's.

December 13, 2008

Blagojevich's Realtor Wife and Lobbyist Tipper

I was in Chicago for the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws annual conference for a week, which is why I haven't been blogging lately. I was there when Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested, so the arrest and the tales of selling a Senate seat and blackmailing the Chicago Tribune are old news now. But there are a couple of interesting facts about the situation which have been largely ignored.

March 19, 2007

Blaming Those Who Call for Ethical Conduct - Quote of the Day

Connecticut House Speaker James A. Amann has been receiving a great deal of criticism for asking lobbyists for contributions to the charity he works for as a paid fundraiser (including criticism from me: see my blog entry on fundraising problems).

Resources & Learning April 4, 2011

Blind Spots I — Unconscious Unethical Conduct

Although it is not a book about government ethics, Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel (Princeton University Press) is a must-read book for government ethics practitioners.

Resources & Learning April 6, 2011

Blind Spots II — Motivated Blindness

Although we have more trouble seeing our own unethical behavior than we do seeing others' unethical behavior, Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, have found that people have a tendency "to overlook the unethical behavior of others when it is not in their best interest to notice the infraction." They call this "motivated blindness."

Resources & Learning April 6, 2011

Blind Spots III — Ethics Training, Ethics Fading, and Ethical Reasoning

"Most of us dramatically underestimate the degree to which our behavior is affected by incentives and other situational factors." This is one of the most important sentences in Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a new book by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel (Princeton University Press).

Ethical Fading

Resources & Learning April 7, 2011

Blind Spots IV — Egocentrism

Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), point out that egocentrism is in our nature. We naturally see the world from our point of view. We squeeze what we see and experience into our view of ourselves. We never get too far away from the baby's concept that the world exists for us, even if no longer for us alone.

Resources & Learning April 8, 2011

Blind Spots V — Informal Norms

Government ethics involves itself primarily with the formal norms set forth in ethics codes. But as the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), point out, "It is through informal mechanisms that employees learn the 'true values' of the organization."

Resources & Learning April 9, 2011

Blind Spots VI — Psychological Cleansing and Obfuscation

The denial of unethical behavior, which usually occurs long after the behavior itself, is usually the worst part of an ethics scandal, the adding of insult to injury. The public is faced with two possibilities when an official denies that he did something unethical. This dilemma is well described in Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a new book by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E.

Resources & Learning April 10, 2011

Blind Spots VII — Indirect Blindness and Moral Compensation

I've noted on several occasions that indirect conflicts are among the most problematic areas in government ethics. Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a new book by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel (Princeton University Press), looks into some of the psychological aspects of the indirectness problem.

Resources & Learning April 11, 2011

Blind Spots VIII — How to Handle Our Blind Spots

Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, the authors of the new book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), present several ways of dealing with the many problems they raise in their book.

Ethics Commissions & Administration July 4, 2011

Blog Posts on Ethics Commission Independence

For Independence Day, here's a blog post that pulls together all past blog posts on ethics commission independence. EC independence is essential to an effective and respected ethics program, and yet a small minority of ECs are truly independent. Those individuals seeking to make their city or county's EC independent or to set up an independent EC need all the ammunition they can get. That is, they need to know what the options are, what the advantages are, and how ineffective and unrespected non-independent ethics advice and enforcement are.

Transparency & Disclosure June 11, 2008

Blogging by Local Government Officials - A New Kind of Transparency

Once again, California is in the vanguard. This time, it's blogs by mayors, city managers, and other local government officials (for list, click here; not all of these are government officials' blogs, but many are and it's not hard to tell them apart).

Conflicts of Interest April 27, 2009

Board Members and Jobs Under the Board's Supervision

Massachusetts has an interesting, but I think limited ethics provision that applies to local government board members and jobs under their board's supervision:

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play February 18, 2009

Bond Advisers: Pay-to-Play, Phantom Bonds, and a Serious Lack of Transparency

An article in yesterday's New York Times points to yet another clever end run around ethics laws involving municipal bonds. Bond underwriters are not allowed to make campaign contributions, to prevent a pay-to-play environment. However, financial advisers, the people who hook local governments up with bond underwriters, are allowed to make campaign contributions. And so they do, in large quantities, it appears, even though they work closely with underwriters as a team.