On January 28, the New York State Bar Association issued a
report on government ethics reform in New York State, which
includes a section on local government ethics reform. The report points out the many inadequacies of...
Last
month, I wrote about how the Green Bay ethics board hadn't met much
more than the Packers had won Super Bowls. Well, now that the Packers
have won another, it's time for the ethics board to meet again (the
last time it met was in 1999).
One thing Green Bay and Pittsburgh officials have in common is their
payment for face-value Super Bowl tickets. You may wonder what is...
Last month, I did a
blog
post on the huge exceptions to Alabama's
new
gift provisions (pp. 24-26). What I didn't note was the similarities, and the gulf,
between the bribery provision in Alabama's constitution and the gift provisions in the old and new statutes, and how this
has...
According to an
op-ed
piece by a county commissioner from Collier County, Florida (in the
Naples Daily News), two interesting twists on the gift to an
official's favorite charity gambit occurred recently. Gifts to officials'
favorite charities are a common way to get around pay-to-play laws.
Here is what...
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.
There are several problems with Houston's new ethics provisions, in
addition to what I pointed out in my last blog post. Some of them are
typical, some of them are unusual. The ethics reform ordinance is attached;
see below; the
old
ethics ordinance can be found by clicking here and scrolling down
on the left to Code of Ordinances Chapter 18).