City Related

According to <a href="http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070412/NEWS… article in today's Louisville <i>Courier-Journal</i></a>, there is a dispute in Jeffersonville, Kentucky that is worth taking a look at.

The mayor has accused the city board of ethics' attorney of having a conflict of interest and is urging that he be fired. The conflict involves support for the another mayoral candidate (in the primary).

Having politicians on the Queensbury, NY Ethics Board has created a mess.

Who should be in charge of writing and revising municipal ethics codes?

<i>Below is an op-ed piece I wrote this week for the North Haven </i>Post<i> about the unethical conduct involved in my town's budget process. Nothing was done illegally or in violation of the town's mediocre ethics code.

I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, <i>Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation</i> in the latest issue of the <i>New York Review of Books.</i> Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics.

When an official makes <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/234">an Ad Hominem attack</a>, everyone realizes there is an attack. And when an official makes <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/244">an Ad Populum defense</a>, everyone realizes that there is a defense. But when an official sets up a Straw Man, the situation isn't so clear. It's not an attack or a defense, but a response to an argument.

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book <i>The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role</i> (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries.

Responsibility is the key to municipal ethics as well as administration. It is central to democratic accountability, to recognizing and dealing with sometimes conflicting obligations, to being a public servant.

In <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/254">an earlier blog entry, </a> I took the side of the Louisiana Board of Ethics in its dispute with the state legislature over whether it has jurisdiction over legislators who participate in debate when they have a conflict of interest. In another case, which the Board of Ethics lost on appeal, I feel the Board of Ethics was wrong, and I feel it is instructive to say why.

It is not enough to reform a city's ethics program. One must also let the world know about it. Most municipalities reform their ethics in a vacuum. They might look at a nearby town or city, or two, but the people in charge rarely know what is happening elsewhere, what are the norms and what are the latest reforms. This is one of the reasons we have put this website together.

With apologies to Louisiana, since this week I've already focused on its legislators' dispute with its Board of Ethics, I'm going to return to the state to discuss a situation where local government ethics can make a great difference.