Local Government Practice

There is lobbying, and then there is lobbying. One of the most difficult things about regulating lobbying is defining what it means to lobby. And according to an op-ed piece last week in the New York Times by journalism professor Thomas D.

According to an article yesterday in the Seguin (TX) Gazette, there will be a perfectly ordinary local government ethics occurrence next Monday in Seguin, a town of 25,000 outside San Antonio: the city's ethics commission will meet in closed session to discuss a recently filed ethics complaint.

I've been writing a lot about government ethics and behavioral psychology over the last few years. I consider some of the findings of behavioral psychology, especially about blind spots, essential to understanding what leads to ethical misconduct and, therefore, essential to ethics training, ethics advice, and ethics enforcement. But behavioral psychology has not yet been embraced by American government ethics programs, at least as far as I have seen.

A "resign to run" law is an unusual sort of conflicts of interest law. It requires that before an elected official runs for a different office, she resign from her current office. Philadelphia's "resign to run" law is one of the most onerous ones. According to the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia good government organization, other cities that have such laws, such as Phoenix and Dallas, also have term limits for council members. Philadelphia does not.

According to a press release from the American League of Lobbyists, the association that lobbies for lobbyists, the membership has voted to change its name and "brand" to the Association of Government Relations Professionals.

It's good that lobbyists do not run election campaigns, because their branding is pretty blind. The acronym for their new name is going to be, whatever they may say, AGRIP, as in "a grip on the necks of elected officials." Couldn't they have seen this coming?

Tomorrow morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway, regarding prayer at meetings of local legislative bodies. In addition to the important constitutional questions regarding separation of church and state, there are government ethics questions involved. This post will consider those ethics questions.

Updated: November 20, 2013 (see below)

The gift regulation proposed by Philadelphia's ethics board last week (attached; see below) provides a great opportunity to consider many issues involving gift bans and exceptions.

In many jurisdictions, lawyers have sought to be excluded from ethics program jurisdiction, arguing that their conduct is regulated by their state's attorney disciplinary process. Recently, in Louisiana, other professionals have sought to be excluded from the state ethics program's jurisdiction (which includes local officials) pursuant to a different argument.

The issue is, When do employees of a private company become government employees for purposes of ethics program jurisdiction over them?

Yesterday evening, I attended a meeting of my town's planning and zoning commission. The principal agenda item involved a request for an amendment to the town plan to allow the building of a private recycling center in the town. The commission's secretary read a letter from the requesting party's attorney, who is a member of another town board, withdrawing the request. The letter said that the principal reason for withdrawal of the request was opposition to the amendment by a small group of citizens who had "distorted" the facts.

Here's an interesting local government ethics scenario from Ottawa that deals with the often neglected oversight relationship. According to an article this week in the Ottawa Citizen, six people died in a recent bus-train accident at the Woodroffe Avenue train crossing in Ottawa. This brought attention to the safety of the train crossing's design.