City Related

This story can be found on Jacksonville.com at http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/041208/met_267642192.shtml.

The Florida Times-Union
April 12, 2008
By BETH KORMANIK,
The Times-Union

Do ethics board members have a duty to follow more than the letter of their ethics code? This issue has arisen with respect to the Detroit Board of Ethics. The Board’s chair, attorney Reginald Turner, joined the membership (that is, fundraising) committee of a defense fund for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. A complaint has been filed against the mayor with the Board of Ethics. Therefore, the Board chair is helping to raise funds to defend against a case that may come before the Board.

Financial disclosure scares citizens away from sitting on local boards and commissions. This is the “fact” stated every time any level of financial disclosure is discussed. In my state, Connecticut, all the financial disclosure that was required in a recent bill was the name of one’s employer, and yet the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities opposed it with the same old canard. “Canard” is French for “duck” or, more appropriately in this case, “Duck!” which is effectively what municipal officials are saying when they oppose financial disclosure.

There is one local government conflict of interest that is often ignored because it was created at the federal level by a federal statute. The statute is known as the Hatch Act of 1939 (Title 5, Subchapter III), originally known as An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities (they don’t make statute names like they used to). The Hatch Act limits the political activities of local government employees who are principally employed by programs funded in whole or in part by the U.S.

New York politicians are making life hard for ethical politicians. “Present yourself as ethical,” they are effectively telling them, “and everyone will be harder on you when you don’t live up to expectations.

Not all municipal ethics problems arise from a municipality. One place where there is a great deal of opportunity for municipal misconduct is the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. (HUD) HUD oversees and funds housing authorities across the country. It gets involved, directly and indirectly, in land and development deals and contracts. As with so many other agencies, the people who run HUD come from the same world as the people they oversee and fund.

One nearly untouchable aspect of government ethics is the role of parties. This is less a problem in municipalities than at other levels of government, because most municipalities in the U.S. are nonpartisan, although parties still play a role. But many municipalities and, in some states, particularly in the Northeast, all municipalities are still partisan. And most counties are partisan, as well. In many cases, partisanship and local government are hard to separate.

In an upcoming book, The Rule of Law and Development, Michael Trebilcock and Ron Daniels divide developing countries into three groups (according to an article in last week’s Economist): 1. Those where politicians, lawyers, and the public all support legal reform (e.g., Central Europe after the end of communism); 2. Those where politicians support legal reform, but lawyers and the police do not (e.g., Chile); and 3.

An essential problem in many local governments is a lack of transparency. When people do not know what is happening, and access to information is very difficult, democracy is undermined in several ways. Reformers have a difficult time showing what is actually happening or preparing for public meetings and public hearings. Newspapers are dependent on what officials say. Ordinary citizens become indifferent or completely turned off when all news is of the he said-she said variety. Where there is little transparency, there is usually a reason to keep things hidden.

The following appeared in a recent op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times by a young doctor, SreyRam Kuy. The issue was a health insurer asking doctors to report patient conditions that might be used to cancel health insurance. “Physicians hold a trust to protect the health of our patients. We cannot abdicate this sacred trust. ... That a person would allow me to take a scalpel and slice into his body to extirpate diseases is such an extraordinary act of trust.