Advisory Opinions

[Note: I have made changes throughout this blog post, based on a February 25 e-mail message from the COG executive director]

It should feel good when a pet idea of yours becomes a reality. My pet idea is the regional ethics program, whose biggest successes have been of the countywide variety, such as Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County, FL (there is also a Broward County program, but it is run by an inspector general). There are a few regional ethics commissions in Kentucky, and one in Northwest Indiana, but they don't really have ethics programs.

Some very interesting issues arise out of a past (and present) conflict situation that has become an issue in this week's mayoral primary in the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, KS ("UG").

Simplifying Self-Supervision
In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath note that self-control or, more accurately, self-supervision is an exhaustible resource. What looks like laziness or selfishness is often simply exhaustion. Self-supervision gets burned up by managing the impression we make on others, by coping with fears, and by trying to focus on complex instructions.

Note: When I originally wrote this blog post, I erroneously assumed that the ethics commission member whose conflict situation I discuss was the only one selected by the assembly speaker. I since learned that three of the members were selected by the assembly speaker. I would argue, therefore, that these three members are in the same situation (except for the personal opinion expressed about someone who would presumably be involved in the matter). With a fourteen-member commission, the withdrawal of three members from a matter would not hamper consideration of it.

In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Crown, 2010), Chip and Dan Heath focus on three general ways to shape the path toward change:  tweak the environment, build habits, and rally the herd.

It's rare to find a newspaper article that truly appreciates the work a city ethics officer does. So I'm including the entire article below. It's from the Jacksonville Times-Union, and Jacksonville's ethics officer happens to be City Ethics President Carla Miller. Had it been anyone else, I would have run the article right away.

I'm a big supporter of making ethics commissions independent of those over whom they have jurisdiction. Milton, Georgia and, now, Forsyth County, Georgia have come up with an interesting approach to ethics commission independence that has one good point and several bad points.

It's been six years since I last wrote about local government ethics in Tennessee.

No one wants a political government ethics program, and yet the people who most often worry out loud that it will be political want it to be political. This apparent paradox can be explained by looking at the various meanings of the word "political." Which of these meanings is most important to a government ethics program, and which of them are, well, "just politics"? And what can a government ethics program do to lessen politics?

In October, I wrote a blog post about a report commissioned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), based on an investigation of an ethics issue involving a Washington, D.C. council member and transit authority board member. The focus of my post was on the conflicted situation of a city council member on a regional board.