City Related

A city creates the position of inspector general in order to root out, and hopefully prevent, corruption. The inspector general decides to investigate a situation. A city attorney is involved. The attorney-client privilege is invoked. The investigation is blocked. And the word goes out:  if you want to hide your corrupt conduct, involve a city attorney. It's that simple.

Update: April 29, 2010 (see below)

The idea of a possible conflict of interest should not be an excuse for a fishing expedition to find relationships between local government legislators and people or contracts they vote on. This appears to be what is happening in Crossville, a town of 9,000 in east-central Tennessee.

Gray areas in local government ethics don't necessarily have to be gray areas.

According to an article last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a council member whose brother is a lieutenant in the city jail has been very vocal in opposing a plan to lease the jail to the county in which Atlanta sits. It is possible that the council member's brother would lose his job if the lease were approved.

Here is the relevant language in the city's ethics code:

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.

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.

One of the biggest differences between unethical conduct and criminal conduct by government officials is the matter of proving intent. For example, a bribe is nothing more than a gift to a government official where it has been proven that the official intentionally took a gift in return for certain conduct. In government ethics, taking a gift beyond a certain value is all that needs to be proven to show misconduct. The official's conduct, beyond accepting the gift, is irrelevant, as is the official's intent.

Government lawyers enjoy exceptions to transparency laws. Should they also be excepted from government ethics laws? Atlanta senior assistant city attorney Robert N. Godfrey thinks so, according to an article in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution.