Ethics Codes

Annapolis is an unusual little city in many ways. It may only have 40,000 residents, but it's the state capital, the county seat, the home of the U.S. Naval Academy, and equidistant, and not far, from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. With respect to government ethics, the county for which it is the county seat, Anne Arundel County, has a relatively good ethics program, complete with an executive director, which is very...

On November 29, Florida State University’s LeRoy Collins Institute and the new good government group Integrity Florida released a report entitled "Florida Counties Bridge the Ethics Policy Gap", which analyzes the results of a survey of government ethics programs and reforms in 45 of Florida’s 67 counties.

Between the American Thanksgiving holiday and throwing out my back so that I couldn't sit at my computer, I missed one of the most fascinating stories of the year:  a judicial dismissal of Toronto's mayor for a conflict of interest violation. The conflict situation was minor, but the way the mayor handled it and the way Toronto's ethics...

Independent agencies, especially those with lots of money to spend and contracts to enter into, require not just ethics policies, but a comprehensive, independent ethics program. This rarely acknowledged fact has been made clear once again by an external audit of an agency that proved completely unable to self-regulate its officials' and employees' conflicts of interest. The agency is the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), which...

Update: October 10, 2012 (see below)

So far, I have ignored this year's most famous local ethics proceeding, against San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. The reason I ignored it is the reason I am writing about it now:  I think the proceeding should have been dismissed because the sheriff's misconduct involved neither a conflict of interest nor his official duties.

The fact that the complaint was brought by the mayor against an opponent on the city's board of...

It was very refreshing to hear Ann Arbor council member Steven Kunselman, in an interview with Jeanine DeLay of A2Ethics, an Ann Arbor-based ethics organization, talking openly, honestly, and intelligently about some local government ethics situations. The two situations he...