City Related

It's tough to get rid of officials guilty of serious misconduct. Recall and impeachment are long, grueling processes, which are of no value late in an official's term. Rarely is removal from office for an ethics violation an option, and ethics investigations and hearings, including appeal to a court, can take a long time, as well. It's easier when an official has been found guilty of a crime, but there are all sorts of ways to delay a criminal case. In the meantime, a city or county administration can come to a standstill, as is the case in Detroit.

What do sinkholes and poor drainage in a newly-built highway have to do with government ethics? Often, they are the result of incompetence. But they are also often the result of unethical conduct.

That seems to be the cause in Connecticut's big highway mess that has slowly been unveiled over the last two-and-a-half years, most recently in an article in the September issue of Connecticut magazine. The mess involves improvements to a 3-mile strip of Interstate 84, a $60-million  project whose cost has been increased by about $50 million, so far.

According to a recent article in the Daily Sentinel, a Mesa County (CO) Commissioner says that he is running for re-election on his energy-industry experience (he is a principal of an energy services company that contracts with local oil and gas companies). Energy appears to be a principal industry in Mesa County, and one that often comes before the County Commission.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has come up with a new defense of a potential conflict of interest: "I'm investing in something I believe in."

What she was investing in, as "part of an entrepreneurial package," as she said on yesterday's Meet the Press, according to a partial transcript, was T. Boone Pickens' Clean Energy Fuels Corp., which despite Pickens' emphasis on wind power, also invests in using natural gas instead of gasoline for transportation, an important goal for Pelosi.

I'd like to follow up on what I said at the end of yesterday's blog entry, about jurisdictions that make ethics violations criminal and require a showing of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and a showing of intentionality or recklessness or negligence. Here is the penalty provision in the Arizona Conduct of Office chapter, which applies equally to local governments (to see the entire chapter, click here and scroll down to Chapter 3):

A conflict controversy in Benson, Arizona shows how important participation can be where there is a conflict, even when an official does not vote. According to an article in the San Pedro Valley News-Sun, the mayor was in escrow to purchase property for which he was seeking to (and successfully did) reduce the time (from six to two months) for rezoning from residential to business. After doing this, he did not vote on the matter.

Local election officials have been put in a bind since the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed by Congress in 2002. Federal and state requirements limit their control over voting processes, and there have been many problems with the companies that provide voting equipment and services. Besides the pains of dealing with these companies from a position of weakness, the biggest problem is accountability and confidence in the voting process.

Campaign contributions are not generally considered to be bribes, but the perception of large campaign contributions from local government contractors is often that they are payments for contracts past or future, what is known in the government ethics business as "pay-to-play."

Tomorrow, I am going to Guantanamo Bay. To get there, I have to drive through Guantanamo Bay.

How could that be? For the same reason that you might be sitting in Guantanamo Bay as you read this:  because innocent people are being held, and mistreated, in long-term detention all over the United States, including in local government facilities (see map).

Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.

Ted Stevens has been indicted for falsely reporting over $250,000 in services he received from an oil company that renovated his home. He denies the charges.

Whether or not he's guilty of these charges, he is certainly guilty of a conflict of interest that plagues politicians at all levels of government:  identifying himself with his constituency, and abusing his power to benefit his constituents, to his own benefit, at the expense of others whose representatives lack that power.