City Ethics | Breaking the oxymoron: "City Ethics"

Ethics Commissions & Administration August 18, 2009

The Witch Hunt Argument Against Ethics Commissions with Teeth

Update - see below (9/2/09) One of the biggest limitations on local government ethics codes can be state ethics laws. In Connecticut, for example, state laws seriously limit how much local ethics commissions can fine violators of an ethics code. In fact, the language is so vague, many lawyers insis…

Conflicts of Interest August 17, 2009

Valuing Gifts, and Courtesies to an Office

Update below (Aug. 20, 2009) Is the value of a gift given to a government official its fair market value or what the official gets out of it? For example, if you give an official a sportscar worth $40,000 and he only drives it ten times a year, is its value $40,000 or the cost of renting a car ten …

Ethics Codes & Reform August 17, 2009

The Anti-Corruption Political Strategy. And an Alternative.

One of the principal reasons I have devoted myself to local government ethics is that the ethical habits of government officials and politicians are usually formed at the local level. Politicians who become accustomed to a poor local ethics environment bring their values to state and federal govern…

August 14, 2009

Government Ethics in the City of Albany, NY: Gifts and a Draft Ethics Code

There's a lot of talk about the lack of government ethics in Albany, New York State's capital, but not much about the state of government ethics in the city of Albany itself. In July, the Albany Times-Union ran a long article on the mayor and the police chief's relationship with the city's largest …

Conflicts of Interest August 12, 2009

Stretching the Concept of Conflict Too Far

The concept of a conflict of interest is sometimes stretched far beyond what government ethics laws say, usually by those making accusations against government officials. But here is an example where a respected judge stretched the concept even further. It comes from a decision by Judge Friendly in…

Conflicts of Interest August 12, 2009

Dealings with Banks

According to a Washington Post article this weekend, U.S. Senators Conrad and Dodd were cleared by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics with respect to the senators' membership in Countrywide Financial's VIP mortgage program. The committee concluded that the senators were given special treatment, …

Conflicts of Interest August 12, 2009

Professional Confidentiality and the Disclosure of Conflicts

John Hazlehurst's observation on the Colorado Springs ethics commission's dismissal of a complaint against the mayor is valuable enough to deserve a separate blog post, rather than a mere update to my original post on this topic. An important issue involved the mayor's insistence that, as an invest…

Ethics Codes & Reform August 11, 2009

An Anti-Ethics Reform Rant Worth Reading

People frequently belittle government ethics reforms as meaningless window dressing intended to make politicians look like they're being ethical, something I have said myself in certain contexts. Yet it is worth reading an extreme view of this, which oddly comes from a journalist writing a blog tha…

August 11, 2009

More Chicago Creativity

Chicago politicians are endlessly creative. A few weeks ago I wrote about an alderman on the zoning committee who pushed for zoning changes to help developers who used his wife as their realtor. It turns out that his boss, William J. P. Banks, head of the zoning committee, is going to have a retire…

Conflicts of Interest August 10, 2009

Hiring Experts and Giving Ethics Waivers: The Henry Paulson, Jr. Story

Again, a very public federal conflict of interest matter provides valuable material relevant to local government ethics. This time it's former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr.'s relationship with the firm he formerly headed, Goldman Sachs, the subject of a front-page story in Sunday's New Y…

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