Ethics Commissions & Administration

David A. Marcello, the Executive Director of the Public Law Center at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, has been keeping close tabs on New Orleans' troubled ethics program. In 2011, he published a report on how Hurricane Katrina (2005) led New Orleans' officials to turn a moribund ethics program into one of the best local government ethics programs in the U.S., at least on paper.

According to an article yesterday in the Rockdale Citizen, Rockdale County, GA's county commission is having a debate on how to select its three-member ethics board and its alternates. Unfortunately, it's a debate that is being waged with no reference to best practices and almost no outside professional input. It's as if a debate about a construction project were to include little input from or reference to the work of engineers or planners.

Ethics commissions appointed by local legislative bodies, mayors, or county executives are often referred to as "independent commissions." I don't believe that these commissions should be considered "independent," because those who select the EC members are under the members' jurisdiction and, in fact, are the people most likely to come before them. These EC members are perceived as biased toward their appointing party, which is far from "independence."

The logic of a California appellate decision on Monday, in the case of St. Croix v. Superior Court (A140308, July 28, 2014) (attached; see below), doesn't seem right to me. It skips steps. St. Croix is the executive director of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, and this matter involves a public records request for documents relating to the commission’s regulations governing ethics complaints. Here's how the court's logic goes:

The big news in the government ethics world today is the investigative piece in the New York Times about New York governor Andrew Cuomo's interference in the work of the Moreland Commission he created to investigate corruption in the state government and to recommend reforms to prevent such corruption (see my blo

An excellent editorial yesterday by Dan Barton, editor of the Kingston (NY) Times, raises a few important issues relating to local government ethics proceedings.

According to Barton, Kingston's new ethics board dismissed a complaint from a city alderman that the mayor had violated the ethics code by hiring as an attorney for the city's local development corporation a lawyer with whom the mayor practiced as "of counsel."

Rhode Island's lawmakers really know how to protect themselves. They have fought hard and long to effectively preserve their immunity from state ethics commission jurisdiction. However, with pressure on them to recommend to their constituents a constitutional amendment that would give the EC jurisdiction over them, despite the state's Speech in (sic) Debate Clause, they have planted a bomb in their proposed amendment that will ensure that even the state's good government organizations would oppose it (and that few ordinary citizens would understand what all the fuss was about).

The Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL), an association of American and Canadian practitioners in the areas of conflicts of interest, campaign finance, transparency, elections, and lobbying, is looking into the possibility of offering certification programs in these areas. I assume the courses would be both about the topics and about administering programs in these areas.

How much jurisdiction need a government ethics program have over procurement matters when there is a procurement program dealing with them? This question, common to all cities and counties, is being asked in Honolulu, with respect to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART), which will be soon awarding about a billion dollars in contracts.