Conflicts of Interest

It's hard for ethics codes to deal with every kind of relationship where nepotism might be a problem. In a matter involving the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), the relationship involves oversight.

Incompatible offices is a form of conflict I have not dealt with in this blog. A good occasion to do this is a recent California attorney general's opinion interpreting the state's 2005 incompatible offices statute, which applies to local and state "public officers." The opinion provides valuable definitions, as well as useful perspectives on the idea of office incompatibility.

Defining "Public Office"

Without giving it any thought, it would be hard to think of a better fit than a city politician running the local chamber of commerce. After all, the goals of a chamber of commerce and of a city government are pretty much the same:  security, good government, good services, low taxes.

Some local government ethics codes include a provision prohibiting officials from acting outside of their authority, which is especially directed at council members interfering in a city or county's management. I don't consider this a government ethics issue, since it does not necessarily involve favoritism, the official's personal interest, or anyone's personal interest. It is most often just a matter of the official trying to get things done through improper channels, which is a political issue that should be dealt with in council rules or in standards of conduct.

It's always nice to know that your discipline is at the heart of what it means to be human. In Tuesday's New York Times Science Section, Nicholas Wade wrote:

Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article based on a long-term investigation of group homes for the developmentally disabled in New York state. It found that "in hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses and, in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state." It sounds as if officials were following the Catholic Church's handling of its abuse cases.

My last blog post raised an interesting question. When an annual financial disclosure form (or, in some jurisdictions a special declaration of gifts received) requires the disclosure of all gifts from restricted sources, what are the expectations of an official who pays rent to a restricted source? How is the official expected to determine whether he has received a gift or not?

It is generally agreed that it is best to preserve an ethics commission's jurisdiction over officials and employees after they quit or leave office. There are two reasons for this. One, to prevent them from escaping enforcement by quitting or leaving office. This is especially important because it can take a long time for information to come out that an ethics violation might have occurred, and for an ethics proceeding to be completed. The second reason is to allow for post-employment restrictions.

"It's a very powerful story of a public official who wanted to do the right thing, who got appropriate advice, and then ended up being punished. He was punished for doing his public duty and voting, just because a political ally was involved. I don't call that a conflict of interest. I call that democracy."

—Joshua Rosenkranz, a New York lawyer representing Sparks City (NV) council member Mike Carrigan in his appeal to the U.S.

I had a conversation with a developer the other day, which got me thinking in what I think are interesting ways about unwritten land use rules.

Pressures on Developers