City Related

Type the word "ethics" into the Birmingham, AL website search box and nothing comes up. Nor can you find the city's ordinances. Mayor Larry Langford bills himself as a great reformer, but he certainly hasn't done anything to reform the city's ethics laws, or at least to let anyone know about them. In fact, according to the City Ethics site, the ethics ordinance and board used to be on the city website, but the links no longer work.

There are two principal ways of dealing with gifts to government officials and employees, and both of them are unsatisfactory, although certainly better than ignoring them completely. One approach is prohibition, the other disclosure.

In Saybrook, IL, two members of both a sportman's club and a village board of trustees resigned their sportman's club membership so they would have no conflict voting on annexation of the club by the village. According to a letter to the editor of the Bloomington Pantagraph, the two members reserved their right to rejoin the club after the annexation issue was dealt with. Does resigning like this negate any conflict of interest?

According to an article in the Washington Post this week, a politics professor, David E.

A Nevada court found yesterday that the state ethics commission did not have jurisdiction over a state senator on grounds of legislative immunity, even though the state constitution has no Speech or Debate Clause. The judge gave the senator a preliminary injuction to prevent his having to appear before the ethics commission next week. No decision is available yet, but the judge did say that the state constitution would have to be amended for the ethics commission to have jurisdiction over a state legislator.

Gift disclosure and limitations are an important part of government ethics. But rarely do we think of what gifts mean. Usually this goes little further than politicians saying, "I can't be bought."

Most ethics codes effectively define a conflict of interest as a conflict between an official's personal financial interest and an official's obligation to the public interest. But this leaves out an enormous number of personal interests, many of which are themselves financial, including the financial interests of family members, business associates, and favorite charities.

The NYC Campaign Finance Board has put together an excellent Doing Business Database, consisting of a searchable list of individuals (principal owners, principal officers, and senior managers of entities) “doing business” with a wide assortment of city agencies and quasi-governmental entities, including through contracts, bids or proposals for contracts, concessions, franchises, grants, economic development agreements, and pension fund investment agreements, as well as those engaged in real property transactions (the sa

Last month, I wrote about the conflict of interest that led credit agencies to ignore the risk inherent in mortgage-backed securities. A front-page article in today's New York Times shows how a different sort of conflict of interest at Citigroup allowed the risks involved in these securities to be ignored. No crimes, no politics, just plain old conflict of interest. With an extremely big price tag for our society.

A controversy currently going on in Fairfield, CT reminded me that one of the more easily misunderstood provisions of an ethics code is the special consideration, preferential treatment, or favoritism provision. The version in the City Ethics Model Code reads as follows:

An official or employee may not grant or receive, directly or indirectly, any special consideration, treatment, or advantage beyond what is generally available to city residents.