City Related

Hiding a conflict of interest can lead to much worse problems than appearing before an ethics commission and getting your hand slapped, or even getting slapped with a fine. A criminal case in Winston-Salem, NC this week shows how bad things can get.

Ethics codes do not generally have rules about the involvement of spouses of government officials in citizen groups. But this can create serious appearance problems, as it has in St. Charles, Illinois, an hour west of Chicago, according to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune.

There are two interesting developments going on in Texas right now, and two bills that will be heard in committee today.

One involves a request to the state legislature by El Paso County to allow local governments to give their ethics commissions teeth (they now can only censure).

I recently wrote about the problem of having a toothless ethics commission in a Connecticut city. According to an article in yesterday's Danbury News-Times, it's good that another Connecticut municipality's ethics commission is toothless.

In third world countries, corruption is said to grease the wheels of commerce. We don't like to believe that this is true in the U.S., and we certainly don't have to grease the palms of ordinary government employees in order to get any service.

But what would happen if pay-to-play were truly brought to its knees?

Anonymous complaints are both important and problematic. Without anonymous tips and hotlines, our justice system would not work nearly as well as it does. With ethics programs, officials involved in unethical conduct often have great power in the community, and the people who know what they are doing are often the very people most vulnerable to their retribution.

And yet there is an air of cowardice around anonymous complaints, possibly even moreso now that people make anonymous attacks on public figures all over the Internet.

One of the biggest obstacles to ethics reform in some U.S. states and Canadian provinces is the possibility of state enforcement of local ethics. For example, in Connecticut, there has been talk for years at the state level about either having state enforcement or state requirements. Even though it has all been talk, and the towns and cities have successfully talked it down, the same town and city CEOs have said that it's silly to talk about local ethics reform when something might happen at the state level. It's a great way to eat your cake and have it, too.

The most complicating (sic) part of conflicts of interest is the being interested part. When one is interested in something, not necessarily in a financial way, it can be very hard to get the emotional distance necessary to analyze a conflict properly. In other words, it's hard for many people to admit the possibility that they may have a conflict and then to determine rationally what should be done about it.

A case in point involves the village attorney of Mokena, IL.

Rarely does an ethics commission get a clear chance to show it has no favoritism. The Nevada Commission on Ethics will soon get that chance.

The Nevada senator who raised a legislative immunity defense last year against the commission was accused of a conflict of interest due to his position as president of the Las Vegas chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), a nonunion contractors association.

On the legislative immunity front, according to an article in the Providence Journal, a date has been set for the Rhode Island Supreme Court to hear the appeal by the Rhode Island Ethics Commission of the decision upholding the old constitutional legislative immunity clause against a more recent constitutional amendment creating the ethics commission and giving it jurisdiction over the state legi