Ethics Commissions & Administration

On November 29, Florida State University’s LeRoy Collins Institute and the new good government group Integrity Florida released a report entitled "Florida Counties Bridge the Ethics Policy Gap", which analyzes the results of a survey of government ethics programs and reforms in 45 of Florida’s 67 counties.

In October, I wrote a blog post about a report commissioned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), based on an investigation of an ethics issue involving a Washington, D.C. council member and transit authority board member. The focus of my post was on the conflicted situation of a city council member on a regional board.

Last week, a resident from one of the towns next to mine (Wallingford, CT) called me for advice regarding his request for an advisory opinion. The request involved the appropriateness of council members affiliated with a church participating in a matter that involved funding for renovation of a wall along the church's parking lot. This is a difficult conflict situation, but some town officials made it much more complicated than it had to be.

Update: October 10, 2012 (see below)

So far, I have ignored this year's most famous local ethics proceeding, against San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. The reason I ignored it is the reason I am writing about it now:  I think the proceeding should have been dismissed because the sheriff's misconduct involved neither a conflict of interest nor his official duties.

Ethics program independence is, as far as I'm concerned, the single most important issue in ethics reform. Nothing gains the public's trust as much as an ethics program that is independent from the officials over whom it has jurisdiction.

An interesting issue has arisen in Louisiana. It involves an important distinction in government ethics, between law and function.

I believe that an ethics commission/ethics officer approach to local government ethics is far better than an inspector general approach. The simultaneous creation of an EC/EO approach in Palm Beach County, FL and an IG approach in neighboring Broward County provides a small laboratory for seeing which works better.

Here's an all too common scenario:  A local government creates an ethics program after a scandal, and time passes either without another scandal or with a change of administration. The new administration sees the ethics program as unnecessary, and decides not to fund the program and not to replace ethics commission members who resign or whose terms run out. The ethics program remains on the books, but there is no training, advice, disclosure, or enforcement of the ethics code, no active ethics commission, and no budget.

I've written recently about the propriety of the new chair of D.C.'s ethics commission practicing in matters that involve the city government. In that case, there was an appearance, based on the chair's own website, that he was seeking benefits for his clients from the council and certain city agencies. He said he would not do this while sitting on the ethics commission.