City Related

I may seem obsessed with legislative immunity, but it is both a timely topic for so old a constitutional concept and a serious threat to local government ethics enforcement that, I feel, the government ethics community should start dealing with offensively rather than, as it is now being handled, defensively.

I hadn't realized it, but two weeks ago Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan dismissed a state ethics commission case against the state's former senate president, William V. Irons, due to legislative immunity. Like the Louisiana decision, this one involved a basic conflict of interest - whether Sen. Irons should not have voted on a bill that gave financial benefits to a company for whom he worked.

The DiMasi case, discussed in the most recent blog entry, is not the only ethics case in Massachusetts that has drawn a lot of attention. The result of a perception of increasing ethical misconduct has led the governor to appoint a new task force on public integrity, according to an editorial in today's Boston Globe with an inapt plumbing metaphor in its title, "Drain the Ethics Cesspool."

This week, another state ethics commission is facing a defense of legislative immunity. The state is Massachusetts, and the legislator happens to be the speaker of the house, Sal DiMasi.

I recently discovered that, in May, the Austin's Office of the City Auditor did an extensive report on the city's ethics program, and compared it with 16 comparable American cities (Arlington (TX), Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Kansas City (MO or KS?), Memphis, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose, and Seattle).

One of the most important elements of any government ethics program is ethical hiring. Ethical hiring lowers the possibility of hiring people with serious conflicts of interest not only by being careful about the selection process, but also by sending a clear message that conflicts are serious business and must be disclosed even before an official is hired. Unethical people will find the hiring process, and the thought of working for people who would put them through it, unacceptable and will not apply.

See update below
A central element of government ethics is that preferential treatment is bad. Preferential treatment is bad when it involves favoring officials' businesses or family members over other businesses and individuals. Preferential treatment is even bad when it involves officials' favorite charities. And preferential treatment is especially bad when it involves officials' religions.

California's Proposition 11 raises an interesting conflict of interest issue for local governments whose council members represent districts. Proposition 11 is "a plan to set up a 14-member citizens commission to draw district boundaries for state Senate, Assembly and Board of Equalization seats. State lawmakers currently have that power."

While we're in Nevada, there's another interesting case before the state's ethics commission that has ramifications for local government ethics. According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a probable cause hearing was to be conducted by one Democratic and one Republican commission member.

It's only been a few months since the Louisiana state court decision that applied the constitutional Speech and Debate Clause to remove state legislators from the state ethics commission's jurisdiction, and already a similar case has been filed in Nevada.