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Officials soliciting charitable contributions from those doing business before them is unethical conduct too many ethics codes allow, often expressly. Miami-Dade County has in its ethics code what appears at first to be a very reasonable exception to the definition of a gift:

§2-11.1(2)(2)(g) Gifts solicited by Commissioners on behalf of any nonprofit organization for use solely by that organization where neither the Commissioner nor his or her staff receives any compensation as a...

Back in Chicago, where in February the mayor called for the inspector general (appointed by the mayor) to have jurisdiction over the city council (see my blog post), the council is now moving toward a council-wide vote on its own inspector general.

In the hands of politicians, government ethics can be wielded as a double-edged sword, as can be seen in recent events in Mandeville (LA), a city of 12,000 just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.

Local governments accepting gifts from those who do business with them — contractors, developers, and the like — can cause some serious problems, even when they have to be approved by neutral bodies. This can be seen by what has happened in Middletown, CT, a small city not far from where I live.

The mayor of a city of 46,000 people announces that the city would change its policy requiring annexation to obtain water and sewer service, and then negotiates an agreement with a developer to provide him with utilities. In the middle of the negotiations, the developer gives the mayor's campaign a $10,000 contribution. An ethics complaint is filed with the state ethics commission and, according to an...

Ethics charges are often not the end, but rather the beginning of a process to improve government ethics. Take a recent instance in Los Angeles.