Conflicts

Update: August 18, 2012 (see below)

There is a longstanding pattern of scandals in the cities that the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) chooses for its annual meeting. COGEL was in Chicago when Rod Blagojevich was arrested, and in New Orleans when Rep. Jefferson was re-elected despite the bribery charges against him (they held). COGEL stayed in the D.C. hotel where then mayor Marion Barry had just been arrested.

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 then Governor Deal's alleged campaign finance violations by removing Streicker's position from the budget, seriously cutting Kalberma

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.

Here's an interesting conflict situation from San Mateo County, CA. According to an article in yesterday's Almanac, prosecutors are investigating the selection by two school boards of a project architect for construction projects at the same time that the project architect was remodeling the house of a district official.

Proximity rules are common to local and state government ethics codes nationwide (see my blog post on them from five years ago). They require officials to withdraw from any matter dealing with property within a certain distance of property they own or rent, no matter how many others have property within the same proximity.

Stephen Colbert has been doing a great job satirizing the current federal campaign finance situation. He has especially made a mockery of the Super PAC, a means of allowing individuals and entities to make unlimited contributions to a candidate's campaign under the guise of independent expenditures. Colbert has shown how weak the rules on collaboration are, how the Super PAC is effectively, if not constitutionally, no different than a campaign committee.

“The concern with potential corruption does not stop just because the relationship has entered the bedroom.’’

One thing jumped out at me from an article on the front page of the New York Times today that deals with a common government ethics situation. The situation involves a lobbyist hired because he had a close personal and professional relationship with the head of a department that had to approve his client's project.

Let's say you're a professional who wants to give something back to your community by serving on a city board or commission. You open up the newspaper and read that your mayor is saying, "It is not the five of us commissioners who make the city great. It's the citizens who are passionate about it, and now we're telling them, 'Sorry you can't serve.'"

Everyone knows about ambulance-chasing lawyers, but until reading an article in today's Citizens' Voice of Luzerne County (PA), I had never heard of hearse-chasing deputy coroners. Maybe I would have known about them if I'd watched the TV show Six Feet Under.