City Related

Timing is everything. That is the principal lesson to be learned from a conflict situation in West Palm Beach, FL.

It's sad that it took the Appellate Division of New York state's Supreme Court (not the top court in the state) to disqualify a town attorney from a case when that attorney's firm had represented the opposing party in a matter substantially related to the case.

On April 17, the District of Columbia ethics board filed recommendations for ethics reform with the council (see my blog post on the recommendations). Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie has introduced a bill that includes some of these recommendations (attached; see below).

When people write about public campaign financing programs, they tend to focus on participation percentages and the size of the campaign contributions.

On August 29, the D.C. Board of Ethics and Government Accountability issued an advisory opinion on the important and far too overlooked topic of constituent services (attached; see below). The issuing of advisory opinions that cover more than a very specific set of facts, what I call "general advisory opinions," is itself very valuable (see the section of my book Local Government Ethics Programs on general advisory opinions).

Should the Josephson Institute's Five Principles of Public Ethics be enforceable by a local government? And if not, why not?

Gifts to a local official can fall between jurisdictional cracks, as shown in an article today in the New York Times. They can also fall between definitional cracks. And between these cracks it's gray.

The article reports that, a couple of years ago, Newark NJ's mayor, Cory Booker, who is running for U.S. Senate, was given money by several high-tech executives to found a high-tech company.

Once again, the failure to work out in advance the relationship between an ethics commission and an inspector general's office has led to the locking of horns in the midst of an ethics proceeding. This time the location of the turf war is the District of Columbia.

Here's an interesting case study from Hartford, CT. The facts come from an NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters post from Friday and a report of the city's Chief Auditor dated June 27, 2013.

On Friday, New Orleans' Inspector General, who works for the city's ethics board, sent off two letters relating to the auditor for the Orleans Parish sheriff's office.