Local Government Practice November 11, 2013

Formerly Known as Lobbyists . . .

According to a press release from the American League of Lobbyists, the association that lobbies for lobbyists, the membership has voted to change its name and "brand" to the Association of Government Relations Professionals.

It's good that lobbyists do not run election campaigns, because their branding is pretty blind. The acronym for their new name is going to be, whatever they may say, AGRIP, as in "a grip on the necks of elected officials." Couldn't they have seen this coming?

July 20, 2010

Fort Wayne Deserves a Far Better Ethics Program

If you're a city of a quarter million people with an ethics board that “has not met in many years and ... is effectively non-existent,” according to a council member who has proposed a new ethics ordinance, what do you do?

Not, I think, what the proposed ordinance (p. 16ff) does, which is create a new ethics board solely for council members, and consisting of two council members, the city attorney, and two citizens of their choice.

July 28, 2005

FORUMs in Community building

The use of a self-registration based community website is a relatively new thing for the webmasters of the world.

Ethics Codes & Reform October 13, 2010

Four Varying Approaches to Ethics Reform

Four current attempts at ethics reform show the incredible variety of approaches and ideas of what government ethics is.

Prohibiting County Employees from Contracting with the County

October 15, 2015

Fraud and Ethics Enforcement

Criminal enforcement of ethics violations usually involves fraud, and less so honest services fraud (which was essentially misuse of office) now that it has been essentially limited to bribery. And yet ethics enforcement rarely involves fraud, because ethics codes do not have fraud provisions. This is pretty strange, when you think about it: the same misconduct being treated as apples and oranges.

Resources & Learning April 30, 2015

Free & open source tools for ethics practitioners

WELCOME !!!

Transparency & Disclosure January 13, 2011

Free Speech and Open Meeting Laws

Are Americans turning First Amendment free speech into a fetish?

Local Government Practice December 11, 2010

Free Speech and the Difference Between Elected Officials and Ordinary Citizens

Yet another court decision discussed at the COGEL conference placed First Amendment free speech rights far above the obligations of a government official, employing a strict scrutiny approach where a simple due process (for statutory vagueness) approach would have been sufficient.

Ethics Commissions & Administration January 26, 2007

Funding Ethics Commissions

As I state in my comments to section 207 of the model code, cutting the funding of ethics commissions is a popular way for politicians to prevent investigations from happening.

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play February 12, 2015

Fundraising for a Political Convention: Pay to Play, Transparency, and a Blind Spot

Even the most enthusiastic good government politicians often have a serious blind spot: themselves. They believe that everyone else is into pay to play and selling out to big contributors. But not them. They're only doing what's best for their city. They have only the community's best interests in mind. And sometimes the community needs those big contributors, and who but he is best situated to get them to open their wallets? However, the big contributors don't have the same blind spot, so they don't want the public to know how much they're shelling out.

Conflicts of Interest October 3, 2013

Furloughed Employees Are Still Subject to Ethics Laws

According to an article in the Washington Post this week, the federal Office of Government Ethics has reminded agencies to tell their furloughed employees that "they remain employees of the Federal Government during furlough periods . . .

Resources & Learning April 29, 2015

Future of Ethics Training: Trends

Francesca Gino, Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar and Julia Lee

To build on the gains made in recent years, ethics training will have to accomplish several goals. First, ethics training needs to focus on unleashing participants’ intrinsic motivation to be ethical, rather than rely on s

July 7, 2014

Garbage Ethics Reform in Chicago Sets an Example

Garbage is the principal regular point of contact between individuals and their local government. If people are happy with their garbage pickup, they are likely to be happy with their local government. For this reason, smart high-level local government officials make sure that garbage pickup is done well.

Ethics Commissions & Administration August 22, 2010

General Advisory Opinions Are Very Useful

A couple of months ago, the Ohio Ethics Commission did something very wise and valuable: it drafted an advisory opinion on nepotism rules, gathering information from years of partial, specific advisory opinions, and providing examples. It even gives excellent definitions of each of the relevant terms, including such generally applicable terms as "public contract" and "anything of value."

Ethics Codes & Reform April 15, 2009

Georgia Attempts to Require Local Ethics Enforcement

Last month, the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a bill requiring every local governing body (including school boards) to create an ethics panel to hear complaints regarding at least members of the local governing body and, in counties, elected constitutional officers.

March 20, 2007

Georgia's Aspirational Guidelines

The City Ethics Model Ethics Code includes as an aspirational code the American Society for Professional Administration's (ASPA) Code of Ethics. This is highly unusual, but not unprecedented. One precedent is the Georgia Municipal Association's City of Ethics program, developed in 1999. The Georgia program requires municipalities to do two things in order to qualify.

January 2, 2011

Getting the Green Bay Ethics Program into the Super Bowl

The Green Bay Packers football team is going to try to win its game today in order to get to the playoffs and seek its first Super Bowl victory since 1996. Before 1996, the Packers hadn't won a Super Bowl since Vince Lombardi coached them there in 1967.

Ethics Commissions & Administration August 11, 2011

Getting the Word Out to Lawyers

The American Bar Association Journal does a list of the best law-related blogs each year, and I thought I'd ask my readers to help get this list to work for a good cause: getting more lawyers to learn about local government ethics. City Ethics will get nothing out of being named to the list. To see last year's list (it's broken up into categories; City Ethics would fall under "niche"), click here.

Conflicts of Interest December 6, 2014

Gift Bans and Falling Sales

According to an article in the November 29 issue of The Economist, when China banned gifts to government officials, sales of the principal producer of baijiu, a sort of Chinese vodka, fell 78% in just a year.

The only sales that would likely go down if gifts were banned across the board in the United States would be restaurant and golf club sales. That is because petty bribery is less a problem here than the ongoing reciprocal relationships between lobbyists and the government officials their clients are seeking to influence.

Conflicts of Interest November 28, 2006

Gifts

This is the place to discuss limitations on gifts to officials and employees, and their family members. Probably no other aspect of ethics codes has so many different solutions. Please share your thoughts about and experiences with various attempts at solving this basic problem, and suggest language that you feel works well.

Safra Working Papers