Resources & Learning March 28, 2007

Rushworth Kidder's Book *Moral Courage*

Rushworth Kidder's 2005 book Moral Courage is something all municipal officials should read. It's not only a good introduction to ethics, but it focuses on the quality that is most important to create and maintain an ethical environment in any organization, and especially in governments. But since you probably won't read the book, here are a few of Kidder's points that will most profit municipal officials. Moral courage's principal purpose is to take values from the theoretical to the practical, from thought to action.
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Conflicts of Interest March 25, 2007

The Public-Interested Argument for Recusal

Buried in my blog entry on the Louisiana legislators' attempt to undermine recusal on constitutional grounds is a short discussion of what I refer to as 'the public-interested side' of recusal. I would like to talk a little more about this, because I think the failure to discuss it enough is a serious problem. When a government official has a conflict of interest, he or she is forced to choose between conflicting obligations.
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March 24, 2007

Louisiana Legislators Sue Ethics Board - Including Dialogue with One of the Legislators

Before I got around to putting up a blog entry on the ethics mess in Louisiana, it took a turn for the worse. What started as two legislators protecting the jobs, respectively, of their father and their brother, has turned into a full-fledged constitutional battle that could undermine the concept of recusal for conflicts of interest nationwide. As it is now, ethics codes usually require that legislators, state and municipal, refrain from participating or voting in matters where they have a conflict of interest.
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Conflicts of Interest March 22, 2007

The Class Exception

No, the class exception does not except classy people from ethics codes. It excepts people from recusing themselves when the interests they have that would be affected by an act or decision are similar to a broad class of people. The biggest class is, of course, taxpayers. Municipal officials can vote for budgets even though their taxes are affected by it. Other classes excepted without controversy include homeowners, renters, members of a pension plan, and business owners.
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March 21, 2007

Bitterness Instead of Understanding

No Retreat, No Surrender: One Man's Fight.' If only this were the title of a civil rights leader's memoir. But no civil rights leader would talk about 'one' man's fight; it was a group effort. Only someone who falsely sees himself as walking into a sunset alone after a gunfight would use that subtitle for his memoir. The memoir is Tom DeLay's.
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March 20, 2007

Georgia's Aspirational Guidelines

The City Ethics Model Ethics Code includes as an aspirational code the American Society for Professional Administration's (ASPA) Code of Ethics. This is highly unusual, but not unprecedented. One precedent is the Georgia Municipal Association's City of Ethics program, developed in 1999. The Georgia program requires municipalities to do two things in order to qualify.
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Ethics Commissions & Administration March 20, 2007

Ethics Program Ideas from a Small Town in Vermont

Ethics problems and the need for ethics programs are the stuff of cities and, perhaps, larger towns, or so most people think. In small towns, everyone knows everyone else, and people can't get away with unethical conduct. And as for corruption, there simply aren't enough zeros in the town's budget. There's not much to learn from small towns, in terms of municipal ethics. Right? Middletown Springs, Vermont is a town of 823 (2000 census), and yet its town meeting voted on a proposed conflicts of interest ordinance this month.
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