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?

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.

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.