City Related

According to an official press release, yesterday the mayor of Phoenix announced the formation of an Ethics Review Ad Hoc Task Force, with eleven members appointed by the mayor, to be chaired by former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley and staffed by the city’s law and human resources departments.

The worst recommendation in the Chicago ethics task force's second report (attached; see below) involves the role it wants the corporation counsel to play in the city's ethics program: prosecuting attorney.

I feel strongly that a corporation counsel's office should play no role in an ethics program. See the section of my book Local Government Ethics Programs on the involvement of local government attorneys in an ethics program.

Although the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force, in its first report, came out strongly in favor of more transparency in government, in its second report it came out strongly in favor of what it calls "confidentiality" in the ethics program. I call it what the public calls it: "secrecy."

A front-page article in yesterday's New York Times provides an excellent portrait of a government official who, although doing much good work, made it all about himself and those with whom he has special relationships.

Ethics program independence is, as far as I'm concerned, the single most important issue in ethics reform. Nothing gains the public's trust as much as an ethics program that is independent from the officials over whom it has jurisdiction.

The principal topic of the second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force is the relationship between the Board of Ethics and the city's dual inspectors general, one for the executive branch (the IG) and a new one for the legislative branch (the LIG). Currently, there are communication and jurisdictional problems among these three agencies.

Today, I received a copy of the Dallas City Council agenda addendum for its August 22 meeting. This addendum contains (pp. 11-17) extensive information about a large ($434,495) contract for "the assessment of the City’s current ethics guidelines and the development of an ethics training program." City Ethics was a partner in the losing bid of the Josephson Institute of Ethics.

The second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force came out this week (see my posts on the first report and on the ordinances passed in response to it).

Update: Counsel for the Housing Authority informed me that it was the Authority board, through him, that originally notified HUD of problems, and that another counsel was involved in some of the relevant transactions. Therefore, I have made some changes to the original post.

In a long cover story in last week's Fort Worth Weekly, Peter Gorman looked at the state of government ethics in Fort Worth and, most important, some proposed changes to its ethics program that take it in the wrong direction. Since it was the only article on the proposals, and Gorman paraphrased me often (based on an interview), I was waiting for other local newspapers to jump in and confirm what Gorman wrote.