City Related

Open Records Requests and Ethics Proceedings In an unusual twist on the confidentiality of ethics proceedings, counsel for the Colorado Springs mayor's former client, the person who gave rise to the mayor's apparent conflict of interest, has made an open records request for all documents related to…

A few local government ethics issues come together in the story behind the arrest today of 44 people in a political corruption and international money laundering ring based in New Jersey. The story is best told, so far, in the press release of the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Among…

In a blog post yesterday, I noted that North Carolina was soon to require local governments to pass ethics codes. I've now found out more about the proposed law, and it is disappointing, to say the least. States have taken a variety of approaches to local government ethics. Some have a state local …

Last week, I wrote about municipal corruption scandals in Montreal. This week, I'm happy to be able to write about a report requested by the province of Quebec, which determined that the province's municipalities should all have a code of ethics (only about 10% do now), that the largest cities and …

Ethics Reform and Ethics Environments This weekend, the Press-Enterprise ran an excellent editorial about ethics reform in San Bernardino County. Not only do the editors recognize that watered-down, "symbolic" ethics reform is worthless, but they also recognize that even valuable ethics reform, suc…

Update - July 31, 2009 - see below In my April blog post about the legislative immunity defense made by a former Baltimore council member (now the mayor), I felt that her arguments didn't have a chance. Well, I was wrong. I was wrong primarily because I thought that a state prosecutor would be dete…

We here in the U.S. like to think of Canadians as like us, but better. More honest, less greedy, more accepting of diversity, etc. And they pay for it by being dull. In the realm of government ethics, this sadly isn't true. At least in Montreal. According to a recent article in The Economist, Montr…