Business Associates

A former head of Chicago's public school system has said she will plead guilty to a scheme to take hundreds of thousands of dollars, airfare, meals, and baseball tickets in exchange for steering more than $23 million in no-bid contracts to her former employer, an educational consulting and training company.

It all started with a private meeting among three members of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority board, according to an article last week in the Orlando Sentinel. The subject of the informal meeting was the ouster of the executive director, which took place at the next formal meeting.

Yesterday's blog post discussed the law giving California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) authority over §1090 of the state code, which deals with contract-related conflicts of interest and applies to both local and state officials. Knowing little about this section, which stands outside the state's ethics code (known as the Political Reform Act), I did a little research into it.

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the front page of the New York Times the following day. Yesterday, in a post called "Privatization and Transparency," I discussed new types of privatization involving nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit operates government-funded facilities or programs, such as schools. These nonprofits are sometimes a way for organizers to make money by selling property or services to the schools.

One group of individuals with a great deal of power in local government is not covered by local ethics codes or the other aspects of local ethics programs. That group consists of officers of local political parties.

Two days ago, I wrote about a Louisiana lawyer-legislator who is arguing that disclosure rules should not apply to lawyers, because the practice of law is regulated by the state supreme court. The story behind an indictment in New Jersey this week makes a strong argument for applying disclosure rules to lawyers, as they are in California and North Carolina, only better.

Do Chinese walls (that is, mechanisms that separate someone from information or involvement in a matter) work in conflict situations in government? And what considerations determine whether they work or not?

This month, in Portland, CT, home of the stone used to build New York City's brownstones, the new ethics commission found that it was a violation of the town's ethics code for the board of selectmen (the town's management board) to hire attorneys who had given campaign contributions to the board of selectmen majority's party town committee, according to the EC's minutes. The contributions of the particular attorneys were $20-250.

Update: October 16, 2009 (see below)
In his New York Times legal affairs column today, Adam Liptak focused on what is known as "honest services fraud," which is actually part of a definition of "scheme or artifice to defraud" in the federal mail and wire fraud statute (before reading on, please read my earlier blog post on the meaning and history of honest services fraud).

When I heard about the ACORN sting, when two people posing as pimp and prostitute asked for help in getting a loan to open a brothel, I thought: what would happen if a local government official and a prostitute visited a local government attorney to ask for help in giving the prostitute a contract, so that the local government, rather than the official, could pay for her services?

One big difference is that it is not legal to open a brothel, but it might be legal to use your office to get a local government to give a contract to a prostitute.