The Partisanship of Ethics
The first pleasant surprise involves a
blogger (Advance Indiana) who is disgusted with his own party's
unethical conduct in his city/county, Indianapolis/Marion County. A
native of Illinois, he compares it to Chicago, and he notes that his
party took office because of the other party's unethical conduct. In
this era of partisan blogging, it...
The Grants of a Conflicted Board of Insiders
Sometimes conflicts can cause a city or county serious
problems with such things as state and federal grants. This is what has
happened in Brockton,
MA (pop.
94,000), according to an
article
in the Enterprise-News.
EC Jurisdiction Over Independent Agencies: The Charter's the Answer
In Jacksonville, where City Ethics' president, Carla Miller, is the
ethics officer, the charter revision commission unanimously voted to
give the city's ethics
commission jurisdiction over all the city's independent agencies,
according to an
article in yesterday's Daily Record.
Here's an interesting dual position question, that is, a question
involving one individual holding two government positions. The most
important
conflict involved in dual positions is that you cannot consistently
fulfill
your fiduciary obligations to one constituency while fulfilling your
obligations to the other. See my blog post on state-local
dual positions for a discussion of more...
A NC Local
Government Blog post yesterday made me aware that there have
recently been some very public conflict of interest issues involving
North Carolina's alcoholic beverage control (ABC) system, the state
liquor sales program, which allows
each city and county to have a local alcoholic beverage control board
and employees (163 boards in all).