Conflicts of Interest

If a council member's law firm wants to bid on being the local government's attorney, a contract that is approved by the council, what is the responsible way to handle the matter?

Here are three cases from New York City that involve relations between superiors and subordinates, one of the most important aspects of local government ethics. What is especially interesting is that two of these cases involve co-opting, in one case of subordinates, in the other of vendors. These cases were included in COGEL's ethics update last week.

Co-opting Subordinates

This week the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) met in Washington, D.C. and, as usual, I learned about a lot of cases and matters I didn't know about. I will be sharing some of the more important of my new revelations in blog posts over the next couple of weeks.

Two important issues arise from a story about a competitive bid for a concrete contract for an arena in Louisville which, according to an article in yesterday's Louisville Courier-Journal, was won by a company solely owned by a member of the state task force that chose the site, the chair of the board that manages the arena, a close friend of the coach of the arena's primary tenant, and a nonvoting member of the arena authority, whose executive director reports directly to the board that

There's an instructive local government ethics situation in the 2008 French film The Class (Entre les murs), which I watched yesterday evening. A teenage student is being given a disciplinary hearing at his public high school in Paris after accidentally hitting a girl with his bag and walking out of his class. His teacher is a teacher representative on the disciplinary committee.

I find it fascinating that, although kickbacks (also known as "thanks giving") are one of the central elements of unethical conduct in local governments, I have only mentioned them three times in my blog posts.

Teachers and teachers' family members seem to be just the sort of people to run for school boards. They have either the expertise and/or the interest in education. But with them come conflicts of interest, and these can cast doubt on what they're doing there in the first place.

Teachers in the particular school district generally can't run for school board seats, but many teachers don't live in the districts where they teach. This prohibition often applies to their spouses as well, but not to their parents, siblings, and children.

Indefinite conflicts can cause a lot of problems for officials. They see them as not yet ripe, not something they should have to deal with yet. But others see them as looming in the future, and want to know how the official plans to deal with them. One such indefinite conflict is the subject of controversy in Tampa, where a council candidate is the executive director of a nonprofit organization that has a large contract with the city to build affordable apartments. This sort of indefinite conflict comes up a lot.

What do you do when you are not the only member of your immediate family who is an elected official? This question arose in Frederick County, MD, the home of Camp David.

More from Madison. According to an article last month on the Channel3000.com website, a stagehands union sent 28 copies of a book on creating and maintaining healthy arts organizations to members of the Madison council and members of an ad hoc committee on the future of the city's arts center. The union insists that the books were loaned, not given, and that the book doesn't even take a position on how to handle the arts center.