City Ethics | Breaking the oxymoron: "City Ethics"

February 19, 2014

Winter Reading: "Access and Lobbying"

"Access and Lobbying: Looking Beyond the Corruption Paradigm," by Dorie Apollonio, Bruce E. Cain, and Lee Drutman, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 36:1 (2008) (attached; see below), has some very valuable things to say about local government lobbying, even though it focuses on federal governm…

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play February 19, 2014

Accepting Campaign Contributions from Those Seeking Benefits

One Indian tribe wants to build a casino, another tribe already has one in the area and doesn't want competition. You're a council member in the city that can effectively block the casino from being built. Both tribes want your support, and are willing to back up that support with campaign contribu…

Ethics Commissions & Administration February 18, 2014

Government Ethics Specialists Need Not Apply

I just received an e-mail announcing a search for a new editor of the journal Public Integrity, the only academic journal in the field in which I work. Here is the description of the journal by its publisher on the journal's webpage: Governance is changing rapidly, and change brings compelling ethi…

Ethics Commissions & Administration February 18, 2014

When a Department Engages In Ethics Advice and Enforcement

What should an ethics program do when an agency or department takes ethics advice and enforcement into its own hands? This issue has arisen in Hawaii County, according to two articles in West Hawaii Today, one from two years ago, the other from last week. The county's finance department oversees pr…

Ethics Commissions & Administration February 14, 2014

The Obstacles to and Goals of Citizen Participation

Although citizen participation is not part of government ethics, it's important to keep reminding ourselves that it is central to government ethics, because it is a principal goal of government ethics programs. Officials' ethical misconduct undermines citizen trust and participation, but there are …

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play February 13, 2014

Local Public Campaign Financing and Independent Spending

In a recent blog post, the background issue was the effect of independent spending on a local public campaign financing program in Santa Fe. Especially in the shadow of recent Supreme Court decisions, this is currently a serious problem for many local public campaign financing programs, and is a po…

Conflicts of Interest February 13, 2014

Bribery vs. Acceptance of Gifts

According to an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, yesterday former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was convicted on 20 of the 21 corruption charges against him, primarily for bribery, honest services fraud, and tax fraud. This hard-fought battle was actually about one thing only, whether gifts…

Enforcement & Complaints February 12, 2014

Former EC Members Can Help By Filing Complaints

Since most local ethics commissions do not have the authority to initiate their own investigations or draft their own complaints (although in many cases this authority is not expressly withheld), there is a special role that former EC members, especially chairs, can play: filing complaints that no…

February 12, 2014

Winter Reading: Rick Hasen's "Lobbying, Rent-Seeking, and the Constitution"

UC at Irvine Law School professor Richard Hasen's essay, "Lobbying, Rent-Seeking, and the Constitution," 64 Stanford Law Review 191 (2011), is a good complement to the Teachout essay I recently wrote about. Besides its valuable look at the idea that lobbying should be regulated because it is harmfu…

Local Government Practice February 11, 2014

A Miscellany

Sometimes Withdrawal and Formal Processes Are Not Enough It never looks good when a high-level elected official gets a job with the government while in office or soon after leaving office. It looks like he got the job because of his influence and relationships with those who made the decision. Acco…

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