Local Government Practice

One argument rarely made for effective government ethics programs is that they will prevent government officials from being prosecuted for "honest services fraud."

Honest services fraud is to bribery what manslaughter is to murder. Sort of. By this I mean that many officials accused of bribery plead down to honest services fraud, a lesser, but still serious crime (the maximum sentence is 20 years).

Should an option in a light-rail train car manufacturing contract be exercised, rather than going to a competitive bid, because the company says it will move its plant, and 5,000 jobs, into the county?

This dilemma is being faced by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), and the recession and the stimulus package are both involved. So is an accusation of conflict of interest.

So much of government ethics involves the contrast, and sometimes the collision, between ethics and law. Too often the personal aspect of government ethics is overlooked. All three get twisted together in a very simple matter that occurred last week in the Escondido (CA) city council, according to an article in the North County Times.

Last week, the Kansas City, MO city council ordered an investigation into possibly unethical conduct by the city's mayor, according to an article in the Kansas City Star. The principal conduct is the use of the mayor's former communications director to work on a political campaign (not the mayor's re-election campaign).

According to an article in the Washington Post this week, a politics professor, David E.

One of the most important elements of any government ethics program is ethical hiring. Ethical hiring lowers the possibility of hiring people with serious conflicts of interest not only by being careful about the selection process, but also by sending a clear message that conflicts are serious business and must be disclosed even before an official is hired. Unethical people will find the hiring process, and the thought of working for people who would put them through it, unacceptable and will not apply.

It is rare for the news media to look at government ethics any more deeply than a particular scandal, usually one involving law-breaking, money, sex, or a public argument between parties or within a party. The vice-presidential nomination of Sarah Palin has led to the most in-depth look at government ethics for a long time.

Local governments may only be accountable to their citizens, but they also have fiduciary duties to those who invest in their bonds.

In my recent entry about Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, I said nothing about the fact that the university center he was seeking funds for has his name on it. An excellent entry by John Fund placed up on Huffington Post today focuses on this part of the story.

The drug war is not really about drugs, it's about addiction. And dependency is what powers addiction.

As it turns out, dependency is also what powers the drug war, at least in Texas. Local government agencies, and often local governments themselves, are dependent on the money that comes from asset forfeitures related to the drug trade. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars.

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