Enforcement/Penalties

There are three basic approaches to enforcing ethics laws:  through ethics commissions, through the criminal process, and through the ballot box. I strongly oppose using the criminal process for ethics violations (see an earlier blog post), and feel that the ballot box is far too crude a way to enforce ethics laws, especially considering that voters do not have the facts or know the laws.

A situation in Santa Clara...

Prof. Patricia Salkin, director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School and author of the Law of the Land blog, has published another of her regular roundup of what's been happening recently in the ethics of land use. Her focus is on cases that have...

Hidden in the middle of Question 2 on the New York City ballot this week are two important changes in the city's conflicts of interest law (to my knowledge, the nation's only aptly named ethics code). The current conflicts of interest section of the city charter can be found at pp. 319 ff.

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 often do not apply to consultants. Often, ethics commissions don't even have jurisdiction over consultants.

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I recently wrote about a situation in Stamford, CT in which probable cause was found based on a policy declaration rather than an enforceable ethics provision. That situation appeared to involve a misunderstanding, with a unanimous ethics commission finding probable cause.

According to...

Update: October 8, 2010 (see below)

There's a fascinating ethics controversy going on in Stamford, CT which raises a number of issues involving time limits, the enforcement of declarations of policy, intimidation, and the roles of ethics commissions and inspectors general.