Ethics Codes

In my recent blog posts about Gwinnett County, especially the first, I spoke about how the problem of not following formal processes is a serious government ethics problem, but is often not covered by ethics codes. The Massachusetts Ethics Commission has recently entered into disposition agreements with a member of a town's three-member board of assessors and the...

This third of three posts on ethics reform in Gwinnett County, Georgia looks at the county officials' response to the recommendations in the 2007 report drafted by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia, and in...

In this second of three blog posts on ethics reform in Gwinnett County, Georgia, I will look at recommendations for ethics reform made by a grand jury in its October 2010 report, and by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia in...

The boom years of the Oughts were very good to Gwinnett County, a suburban Atlanta county of 800,000 that grew by a third in the last decade. But boom times are rarely good for local government ethics, and Gwinnett County appears to be no exception. A grand jury report unsealed in October (a searchable copy is attached; see below) found a series of land acquisitions by the county at above market price (even after the...

Sometimes a conflict situation makes you take a fresh look at common ethics provisions. This is true of a matter that has arisen in Poughkeepsie, New York (pronounced Pah-kip'-see), home of Vassar College, according to an article in Tuesday's Poughkeepsie Journal.

The provision in question is...

In a Pay to Play Law Blog response to my recent blog post on a discussion that had appeared in the Pay to Play Law Blog, the argument is made that pay-to-play laws that go beyond disclosure, such as prohibiting campaign contributions from government contractors, set up a slippery slope toward the undermining of constitutional rights and toward higher compliance costs...