County Related

In a recent blog post, I listed the suits filed by Maricopa County's sheriff Joe Arpaio and county attorney Andrew Thomas against other county officials during the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws conference right in the heart of Maricopa County.

Well, it got worse. On the last day of the conference, according to...

After many months of deliberation (and a blog post), yesterday the Palm Beach Board of County Commissioners passed three ordinances, establishing a new ethics and lobbying code, ethics commission, and...

COGEL (Council on Governmental Ethics Laws) annual conferences are often held at a time and place where there are serious government ethics issues. Last year, the conference was held in Chicago the day Gov. Blagojevich was arrested. This year, the conference was held in Maricopa County, AZ, where few days go by when there isn't a serious government ethics issue. Maricopa County has got to be the most dysfunctional county in the U.S.

According to...

It's been a year since the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL), the association of state and local government ethics professionals, met in Cook County, IL. But the day before COGEL meets in Scottdale, AZ, it's time to take another look at one of America's most unethical counties, which includes Chicago.

This time the focus is on the county's townships. The problem is summed up professionally in the abstract to a paper published last year. It's called...

Is it a conflict for a council member to be an officer of a neighborhood association? This issue arose recently in Tulsa, according to an article this week in the Tulsa World.

There are many right and wrong ways to select an ethics commission. The rightest ways take the selection process out of the hands of anyone who could possibly come before the EC, because that places a conflict of interest at the very center of a process intended to guide and enforce the responsible handling of conflicts. The rightest ways also prevent anyone who could possibly come before the EC, or their colleagues, from...