City Related

It would be really helpful if people could find recommendations for ethics reform all in one place, but this rarely happens. Ethics task forces and ethics commissions that ask for such recommendations from good government groups, officials, and academics rarely make them available to the public online. Collections of such recommendations would be a useful resource both for those interested in government ethics in the particular city or county, and for those elsewhere who are considering ethics reform and looking for good ideas.

It can never be said too often that the quality of a government ethics code is meaningless. What matters is how the ethics program actually works.

Take Bridgeport, CT for example. It is the largest city in Connecticut, with a population of 150,000. It is a poor city in a rich county, and it has had a history of corruption, including the mayor's conviction on federal corruption charges a decade ago.

Is it enough for a local official to be "not guilty"? This is the question that has been raised with respect to a Tamarac, FL city commissioner who was found not guilty of bribery in December, according to a column by Michael Mayo this week in the Sun-Sentinel.

Update: December 19, 2012 (see below)

Canadian mayors don't appear to be having a good time of it lately, ethicswise.

Annapolis is an unusual little city in many ways. It may only have 40,000 residents, but it's the state capital, the county seat, the home of the U.S. Naval Academy, and equidistant, and not far, from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. With respect to government ethics, the county for which it is the county seat, Anne Arundel County, has a relatively good ethics program, complete with an executive director, which is very unusual even for a county of half a million people.

In a quality government ethics program, every official and employee involved in a matter publicly discloses any possible conflict and withdraws from the matter. But what if a city or county does not have a quality government ethics program? How is the public to know whether conflicts are being handled responsibly?

When the economy is booming, local government corruption feeds off the sale of government land, development projects, and construction contracts. When the economy is doing poorly, there is usually less money floating around to fund corruption. But in bad times, local governments are willing to accept the help of companies and nonprofits, which might have (or appear to have) their own interests at stake in what they fund for local governments. This leads to another set of problems.

Between the American Thanksgiving holiday and throwing out my back so that I couldn't sit at my computer, I missed one of the most fascinating stories of the year:  a judicial dismissal of Toronto's mayor for a conflict of interest violation. The conflict situation was minor, but the way the mayor handled it and the way Toronto's ethics laws relating to council members, including

In one of my blog posts on the ethics task force's second report, I identified areas that the ethics task force ignored. The first was the low limits on fines. The mayor, in his recommendations, did not recommend increasing them.