City Related

(Note: This post has been revised, based on a response from Steve Berlin, executive director of Chicago's ethics board. I had made the silly assumption that the underlined language in the ethics reform ordinance was new. It turns out that much of that language has been there for some time. So I've deleted some comments and made changes to others.)

Should council members do business with each other or with the mayor? Another way to put this question is, does their doing business together give rise to a conflict of interest?

Update: August 9, 2012 (see below)

People tend to think that all good government people are alike. The thinking goes that those who favor the improvement of ethics programs also favor such things as term limits, referendums and initiatives, and pension forfeiture by those found to have violated the public's trust. As a matter of fact, I don't favor any of these other good government approaches.

Here's an all too common scenario:  A local government creates an ethics program after a scandal, and time passes either without another scandal or with a change of administration. The new administration sees the ethics program as unnecessary, and decides not to fund the program and not to replace ethics commission members who resign or whose terms run out. The ethics program remains on the books, but there is no training, advice, disclosure, or enforcement of the ethics code, no active ethics commission, and no budget.

It's always disheartening to see high-level officials misuse an ethics program for the sake of personal revenge or, as the official says in the case I'm looking at here, to get "my name cleared."

An interesting question arose in an ethics proceeding in Kennesaw, GA, a city of 30,000 just outside of Atlanta. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a Kennesaw Watch blog post, both dated July 17, soon after an ethics complaint was filed against the city's mayor, the mayor sent two text messages to the complainant, asking for a meeting “man to man face to face."

If you read the newspapers and blogs, the big issues in the Chicago Chick-fil-A controversy are free speech and government boycotts. But it's really a government ethics issue.

All rational voices acknowledge that a local legislator should not block a store opening just because it has given large sums to help an unpopular political cause. What they aren't saying is that a local legislator shouldn't be able to block a store opening in his district at all. Zoning matters should not be up to council members. They should be up to zoning boards and zoning officials.

Update: July 27, 2012 (see below)

Talk about independent expenditures usually refers to such expenditures in support, or more often in opposition to, federal candidates. At the local level, the major independent expenditures tend to come from unions, both public service unions and construction unions. There are also cases where independent expenditures come from contractors and others seeking direct benefits from the candidates they support or oppose. This can look very much like a payoff for favors done and/or for future favors, generally referred to as pay to play.