Conflicts of Interest

In my recent blog posts about Gwinnett County, especially the first, I spoke about how the problem of not following formal processes is a serious government ethics problem, but is often not covered by ethics codes.

According to an article in Tuesday's Hartford Advocate, a complaint has been filed with Hartford's ethics commission by a council member against the former corporation counsel on the grounds that he had taken a job with a law firm that had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts overseen by the corporation counsel.

Alabama's new governor, Robert Bentley, said last week in a speech that people who do not accept Jesus as their savior are not his brother or his sister. Leaving the religious aspects of this aside, there are two important government ethics issues here, one involving preferential treatment and the other involving the core government ethics issue, the confusion of self and office.

An editorial in yesterday's Star Press of east central Indiana calls for passage of a state law to prevent municipal employees from sitting on a body that oversees their department or agency's budget. The focus is primarily on preventing city and county workers from sitting on city and county councils.

Local government vendor or supplier codes of conduct are not commonly found in the U.S. In a limited search, I couldn't find one. But corporations commonly have them, as do some Canadian cities and some states and state agencies. And they sound like a good idea.

The reason I raise this idea is that Cuyahoga County's new county executive says he will have one drafted (see my most recent blog post). What can we expect from such a code of conduct?

According to an article yesterday on seacoastonline.com, a committee of the Select Board of North Hampton, NH (pop.

If "conflict of interest" were a cause of action, what would it be? A matter right in the small city next to my town answers this question, and gives a new angle by which to view conflicts.

My last blog post involved the Baltimore Employees' Retirement System board calling in an image consultant to help protect it from an investigation by the city's ethics board.

Chinese walls, that is, ways to separate an official from a matter as to which he has a conflict, are a perfect way to appear to be responsibly handling a series of possible conflicts, but are these walls great or are they window dressing? And even if the walls truly work, are they enough to deal responsibly with a series of possible conflicts?

The COGEL conference last week had an excellent panel on the revolving door between government and business. One thing I learned is that the first post-employment laws were passed in the 1850s and 1860s, and they involved lawyers, a group that often argues that ethics laws should not apply to them (in fact, in Pennsylvania, someone said, revolving door laws cannot be applied to practicing attorneys). The idea of a cooling-off period after government service originated in 1955, well before the post-Watergate explosion of government ethics laws.