Advisory Opinions

In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath focus on three general ways to shape the path toward change:  tweak the environment, build habits, and rally the herd.

Rallying the herd means letting people know what others are doing. When most people do something, the others generally follow on their own or can be...

It's rare to find a newspaper article that truly appreciates the work a city ethics officer does. So I'm including the entire article below. It's from the Jacksonville Times-Union, and Jacksonville's ethics officer happens to be City Ethics President Carla Miller. Had it been anyone else, I would have run the article right away. But after a...

Here's an odd ethics program rule. According to an article last week in the Advocate-Messenger, the Boyle County, KY ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over all the municipalities in the county, requires that a town council vote on whether a matter may be referred to the ethics commission.

I'm a big supporter of making ethics commissions independent of those over whom they have jurisdiction. Milton, Georgia and, now, Forsyth County, Georgia have come up with an interesting approach to ethics commission independence that has one good point and several bad points.

The recent amendments to the Forsyth County ethics code (...

It's been six years since I last wrote about local government ethics in Tennessee. In a January 2007 comment to the forum on recusal, I focused on the fact that the University of Tennessee's Municipal Technical Advisory Service (MTAS) (which operates in cooperation with the Tennessee Municipal League) had prepared...

Update: December 19, 2012 (see below)

I am always amazed at what contraptions people are willing to set up to justify the participation of a city attorney in the ethics program of a large city or county that has sufficient resources to hire an ethics commission staff member or independent ethics officer. I raise this issue because controversial ethics reforms are being voted on today by Fort Worth's council, and one of them includes making a city attorney's ethics advice an...