Conflicts of Interest

Should council members do business with each other or with the mayor? Another way to put this question is, does their doing business together give rise to a conflict of interest? The situation that gave rise to these questions came out recently in Hoboken, NJ. According to an article in the Hudson …

Luis Toro, director of Colorado Watch, wrote an interesting Huffington Post post yesterday about ethics issues relating to Colorado's public trustee system. Public trustees (one per county) oversee the foreclosure system in the state. They work things out between lenders and homeowners. Most of the…

Update: July 27, 2012 (see below) According to an article in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court approved the Philadelphia ethics board's decision that a law firm can provide unpaid legal services to a mayoral candidate only to extent of contribution limits. However, t…

One of the things that really ticks citizens off is when a local official uses his position to try to get out of a traffic ticket. The financial benefit may be minor, but there are two things that are major. One is that this conduct suggests that favoritism is common in the government. That is, the…

Providing incentives to attract companies or get them to expand their operations in a city or county has always been a controversial issue. Incentives are seen as necessary to attract, keep, or expand jobs locally, but they can also be an unnecessary way to get local governments into bidding wars (…

According to Courthouse News Service articles Tuesday and yesterday, former Georgia ethics commission executive secretary Stacey Kalberman and her deputy, Sherry Ellen Streicker, filed suits against the commission and its chair, Patrick Millsaps, for retaliating against their attempt to investigate…

One of the things that always fascinates me is that, while politicians have no problem asking experts legal, financial, engineering, or human resource questions, they feel they know what they need to know about government ethics questions. Take D.C. council member Vincent Orange. According to an ar…

Update: June 20, 2012 (see below) The saying goes that there are two sides to every story. But more commonly there is a story and ways to spin the story. The problem is telling them apart. This week, a Daily Oklahoman editorial took to task the state ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over l…

What is the worst thing a government official can do when a conflict situation becomes public? Is it worse to misrepresent the law, to make accusations against those making the conflict situation public, or to ignore the situation and hope nobody notices? New York governor Andrew Cuomo has done all…

A poor and disconcerting judicial decision on local legislative immunity came down on May 24 from the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, Kickapoo Tribe v. Black. The tribe made the argument in its brief that a watershed district board's members should not be able to raise a defense of …