This week the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) met in Washington, D.C. and, as usual, I learned about a lot of cases and matters I didn't know about. I will be sharing some of the more important of my new revelations in blog posts over the next couple of weeks. I referred to the decision…

Two important issues arise from a story about a competitive bid for a concrete contract for an arena in Louisville which, according to an article in yesterday's Louisville Courier-Journal, was won by a company solely owned by a member of the state task force that chose the site, the chair of the bo…

There's an instructive local government ethics situation in the 2008 French film The Class (Entre les murs), which I watched yesterday evening. A teenage student is being given a disciplinary hearing at his public high school in Paris after accidentally hitting a girl with his bag and walking out o…

I find it fascinating that, although kickbacks (also known as "thanks giving") are one of the central elements of unethical conduct in local governments, I have only mentioned them three times in my blog posts. Kickbacks are a dirty secret for one principal reason:  they are difficult to prove. Alo…