City Related

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries. Responsibility is the key to municipal ethics as well as administration.

In an earlier blog entry, I took the side of the Louisiana Board of Ethics in its dispute with the state legislature over whether it has jurisdiction over legislators who participate in debate when they have a conflict of interest. In another case, which the Board of Ethics lost on appeal, I feel the Board of Ethics was wrong, and I feel it is instructive to say why. The matter involved two parish council members who voted for themselves for mayor pro-tem.

It is not enough to reform a city's ethics program. One must also let the world know about it. Most municipalities reform their ethics in a vacuum. They might look at a nearby town or city, or two, but the people in charge rarely know what is happening elsewhere, what are the norms and what are the latest reforms.

With apologies to Louisiana, since this week I've already focused on its legislators' dispute with its Board of Ethics, I'm going to return to the state to discuss a situation where local government ethics can make a great difference. On the front page of today's New York Times, an article looks at reasons why so little money has made it from Washington to local government infrastructure projects in Louisiana (the article ignores Mississippi and Alabama).

Who should and who should not sit on elections commissions? Other than land-use commissions (and, sadly, ethics commissions), elections commissions are probably the most abused in terms of membership. Take the election commission in Hamblen County, according to the March 7-10, 2007 entries in the noe4accountability blog. It has five members.

Those who have been closely following the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys by the Bush Administration may know that one of them involves a U.S. Attorney who did not move fast enough with an investigation into possible kickbacks relating to the building of a county courthouse in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Yesterday, according to an article in the Albuquerque Tribune, a former Albuquerque mayor, and two others, pleaded guilty in connection with this investigation, and the new U.S.

Laws are highly over-rated. This is one reason why the City Ethics Model Code Project is not just about codes, but the centerpiece of a wide-ranging discussion of all the issues involved in creating, improving, and maintaining local government ethics programs. Laws may be too highly over-rated, but budgets and priorities are too often under-rated. Take Denver. Denver requires political candidates to disclose the employers and occupations of anyone who gives them $200 or more.

Rushworth Kidder's 2005 book Moral Courage is something all municipal officials should read. It's not only a good introduction to ethics, but it focuses on the quality that is most important to create and maintain an ethical environment in any organization, and especially in governments. But since you probably won't read the book, here are a few of Kidder's points that will most profit municipal officials. Moral courage's principal purpose is to take values from the theoretical to the practical, from thought to action.

Early on, I did a blog entry on apology. I even included apology in 107(1) of the Model Ethics Code, as a stated option for officials, so that their municipality does not have to go to the trouble of investigating their actions and holding hearings. Yesterday, I attended a lecture by Nancy Berlinger of the Hastings Center in Garrison, NY on apology in the medical context.

Buried in my blog entry on the Louisiana legislators' attempt to undermine recusal on constitutional grounds is a short discussion of what I refer to as 'the public-interested side' of recusal. I would like to talk a little more about this, because I think the failure to discuss it enough is a serious problem. When a government official has a conflict of interest, he or she is forced to choose between conflicting obligations.