City Ethics | Breaking the oxymoron: "City Ethics"

Local Government Practice April 9, 2007

Circled Wagons: Loyalty and Municipal Ethics

I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Please bear with me as I describe the book before I s…

Resources & Learning April 5, 2007

Logical Fallacies III - The Straw Man Wears Camouflage

When an official makes an Ad Hominem attack, everyone realizes there is an attack. And when an official makes an Ad Populum defense, everyone realizes that there is a defense. But when an official sets up a Straw Man, the situation isn't so clear. It's not an attack or a defense, but a response to …

Resources & Learning April 4, 2007

Terry Cooper's The Responsible Administrator - Thinking Ethically

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries. Responsibility …

Conflicts of Interest April 2, 2007

No Conflict in Voting for Oneself

In an earlier blog entry, I took the side of the Louisiana Board of Ethics in its dispute with the state legislature over whether it has jurisdiction over legislators who participate in debate when they have a conflict of interest. In another case, which the Board of Ethics lost on appeal, I feel t…

Ethics Codes & Reform April 2, 2007

Publicizing Ethics Reform

It is not enough to reform a city's ethics program. One must also let the world know about it. Most municipalities reform their ethics in a vacuum. They might look at a nearby town or city, or two, but the people in charge rarely know what is happening elsewhere, what are the norms and what are the…

Local Government Practice March 31, 2007

Trust in the Face of Disaster

With apologies to Louisiana, since this week I've already focused on its legislators' dispute with its Board of Ethics, I'm going to return to the state to discuss a situation where local government ethics can make a great difference. On the front page of today's New York Times, an article looks at…

Ethics Commissions & Administration March 31, 2007

Elections Commissions

Who should and who should not sit on elections commissions? Other than land-use commissions (and, sadly, ethics commissions), elections commissions are probably the most abused in terms of membership. Take the election commission in Hamblen County, according to the March 7-10, 2007 entries in the n…

March 30, 2007

Albuquerque Ethics Brings Down State and Federal Officials

Those who have been closely following the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys by the Bush Administration may know that one of them involves a U.S. Attorney who did not move fast enough with an investigation into possible kickbacks relating to the building of a county courthouse in Albuquerque, New Mexico. …

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play March 30, 2007

Municipal Campaign Disclosure Laws, Budgets, and Priorities

Laws are highly over-rated. This is one reason why the City Ethics Model Code Project is not just about codes, but the centerpiece of a wide-ranging discussion of all the issues involved in creating, improving, and maintaining local government ethics programs. Laws may be too highly over-rated, but…

Conflicts of Interest March 30, 2007

No Conflict Without Profit? - Exasperating Quote of the Day

A former chancellor of Maricopa Community College in Phoenix, Arizona continued to work for the college on contract, while also having a business on the side that did business with the college on a no-bid basis. The business was set up by the college when he was chancellor and was given to him a fe…

Subscribe to