City Related

Party Committee Members on EC
According to an article in the Hartford Courant this week, a Newington, CT mayoral candidate, and council minority leader, who has made ethics allegations against the incumbent mayor has chosen not to file an ethics complaint because, she says, two of the four members of the town's ethics board are also members of the opposing party's town committee, one of them the nominating chair of the committee.

There are two interesting wrinkles in the Forest Park, GA case I wrote about in the last blog post. According to an article in the Clayton News Daily last Friday, a former Forest Park public works director alleged in an ethics complaint that, in an e-mail message, the mayor had illegally ordered the then city manager to remove him. If true, this would be both a charter and an ethics violation in Forest Park.

There is a fact of life that is very hard for many local elected officials to admit:  most of the campaign contributions given to incumbents and serious challengers come from two sources:  those seeking special benefits from the government and those who work for the government (and their unions). If both of these groups were not permitted to make campaign contributions, local elections would be contested with very little money, unless the government instituted a public campaign financing program.