City Related

For a year and a half, in her Law of the Land blog, Patricia Salkin has been writing about local government ethics issues in land use cases. And since December 2008, she has been writing occasional local government ethics posts for the International Municipal Lawyers Association Local Government Blog.

Last month, I wrote about problems involving municipal bond sales and advice in Tennessee. Yesterday, the state comptroller wrote a guest column explaining what went wrong with municipal bonds and suggesting some of what he will propose today to prevent such problems in the future.

Two days ago, I wrote about a Chicago Heights (IL) situation where two council members who work under a third council member were in a position to vote for their boss to be the city's mayor. A suit brought by a group of local ministers to prevent this from happening was dismissed, according to an article in yesterday's Neighborhood Star.

Electing local government employees to local government office can cause problems. There are constitutional protections against forbidding it, but there are conflict of interest arguments against doing it.

How often should ethics commissions meet?

The usual answer to that question is, As often as they need to. But how often is that?

That depends on their responsibilities. If all they do is respond to complaints and requests for advisory opinions, then they need only meet when they receive one or the other.

But what about ethics training? Even if they are not required to train or oversee training of local government officials and employees, they need to be trained themselves.

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

Requiring supermajority votes by ethics commissions to find probable cause or a violation is probably the best obstacle elected officials can place in the way of effective ethics enforcement. This is especially true of the probable cause phase, if there is one.

Here's an ethics story from Orlando with a good ending. It emphasizes what I wrote recently, that government ethics involves dealing responsibly with conflict situations.

Once again, it has been proven that placing ethics in the hands of prosecutors can be damaging to the cause of government ethics. The proof this time is in the state prosecutor's opposition to the Baltimore mayor's motion to dismiss criminal ethics charges against her, partially on account of legislative immunity.

Booms and busts are common not only in a financial system. They are also common in government ethics.

Booms are when things are good, when local politicians seem worthy of our trust. Busts are when we find out that things aren't what they seemed. In other words, when there's a scandal.