Conflicts

An editorial in yesterday's Star Press of east central Indiana calls for passage of a state law to prevent municipal employees from sitting on a body that oversees their department or agency's budget. The focus is primarily on preventing city and county workers from sitting on city and county counc…

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…

What do you do when you are not the only member of your immediate family who is an elected official? This question arose in Frederick County, MD, the home of Camp David. According to an article in the Frederick News Post this week, Ron Young was elected earlier this year as state senator for the co…

Government pensions are one of the most serious issues facing local and state governments. Most pension plans are underfunded, and the generous pensions, the relatively short vesting periods, and the low retirement ages that allow for at least one more career, not only cost taxpayers a great deal o…

Consultants often fall between the cracks of government ethics. They are contractors, but professionals rather than suppliers or construction companies, and they often act just like government officials, only they're not on the payroll. And yet the ethics rules that apply to government officials of…

Indirect benefits are one of the most problematic issues in government ethics. Usually, indirect benefits relate to an official's relationships, that is, where the official receives not a direct financial benefit, but satisfaction or an indirect benefit from a financial benefit going instead to a r…

Recusal is one of the least well understood aspects of government ethics. Most people seem to think it is limited to abstaining on a vote where you have a conflict of interest, and many ethics codes define it that way, if they require recusal at all. But abstention is not sufficient for many reason…

Note: This blog post was posted on September 22, and I accidentally deleted it. This is a reposting. What is recusal? More to the point, does the act of recusal require merely inaction, or action, or action and words? This has become an issue in the city of Santa Fe, but it is important to establis…