City Related

If anyone questions the value of advice regarding municipal ethics issues, look at these statistics from the Atlanta Ethics Office.

66% of ethics complaints filed in 2007 alleged use of city property.
3% of the requests for advice in 2007 involved use of city property.

If only people would ask. At least, Atlanta has an Ethics Officer to ask.

Campaign finance is an area of municipal ethics that is often treated as a separate field entirely. But they’re closely related. Both involve the conflict between private and public interest, and especially gifts to elected officials. The principal difference is that campaign contributions are a perfectly legal way of giving to elected officials, which makes the problem a bit more complex.

<b>See 1/16/09 addendum at bottom</b>

The dream of every machine politician is to have his city controlled by those who work for him. Unfortunately, every city has citizens who don’t work for the city administration. Or so I thought until I learned about Vernon, California.

Vernon is “an exclusively industrial city,” which is a fancy term for one big conflict of interest.

I just watched the film <a href="http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0057286/&quot; target="”_blank”"><i>Hands Over the City,</i></a> and I believe it should hop up to the top of City Ethics’ list of <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/Top10+Ethics+Films&quot; target="”">Top Ten Ethics Films</a>.

When we talk about gifts to politicians, we often talk about gifts of nominal value being okay. Buy a politician a coffee, what’s wrong with that?

But what happens when it’s the other way around? What if the politician buys a coffee for a citizen? One citizen, no problem. A few more at a fundraiser, that’s okay (and it's not buying votes, but rather buying more money). But what about thousands of citizens? When does something of nominal value become something with a corrupt intention?

Detroit’s mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick is the new poster boy for misuse of office, lack of transparency, and covering up unethical behavior.

An Alaskan state representative needs a new kidney. The <a href="http://www.legis.state.ak.us/PDF/25/Bills/HB0109Z.PDF&quot; target="”_blank”">new state ethics law</a> does not allow gifts over $250. It has a compassionate gift exemption, but it only allows compassionate gifts with a fair market value less than $250. This is one of many unforeseen consequences that comes from ethics codes (or any legislation, for that matter).

According to <a href="http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008802050348&quot; target="”_blank”">an article in the Muncie (IN) <i>Star Press,</a></i> the Muncie City Council voted 5-4 not to adopt the American Society for Public Administration’s ethics code, something that hundreds of citizens at the meeting favored.

The new mayor of Indianapolis, Greg Ballard, who ran as a candidate who would bring ethics to city government, is already embroiled in a controversial ethics issue. He has appointed Robert T. Grand as chair of the Capital Improvement Board (CIB), which manages the city’s convention center and sports stadiums, including that of the Indiana Pacers, a basketball team owned by the Simon family. There is a good chance that the Pacers' lease will be renegotiated next year.

The Ethics Resource Center’s first National Government Ethics Survey has just come out, and is available free at the <a href="http://www.ethics.org/&quot; target="_blank">ERC’s website</a>, although it requires registration. It is the result of a random 2007 telephone poll of government employees, and is part of a series of polls looking at ethics in different sorts of workplaces. City Ethics' Founder, Carla Miller, was on the Advisory Group for this survey.