County Related

Update: December 20, 2012 (see below)

Here's an interesting conflict situation out of Forsyth County, Georgia. According to an article in the Forsyth News, a county commissioner owns a company that buys county water and sells it to county residents who used to have wells. The company owns the infrastructure that supplies water to four subdivisions in the county. It is one of several companies that do this. The companies are charged the flat commercial water rate, rather than residential rates that increase with use.

On April 5, the county commission in Wayne County, MI (which includes Detroit) passed a new ethics ordinance (attached; see below), following multiple scandals. It contains many good provisions, but it does not create a government ethics program.

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts related to bringing false charges against other county officials over a period of years, according to an article in yesterday's Arizona Republic.

Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.

In Georgia, Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) are a creation of state government (they're in the amended 1984 state constitution) that involves local governments in serious potential conflicts of interest, in order to allow developers to fund their public infrastructure with tax-free bonds. CIDs are a clever idea, but cleverness is often inconsistent with government ethics. Smith, Gambrell & Russell, a law firm, has a good, short overview of CIDs.

It's not every day that an article about an insufficiently bid county contract appears on the front page of a major newspaper, but that's what happened today with the New York Times.

Last week, I wrote about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision invalidating a Montgomery County's ethics code to the extent it applied to the employees of independent agencies, such as the district attorney's office.

It is important to take state laws into account when drafting ethics provisions, especially in local governments that do not have home rule charters. Here are two situations in the news where this was not done, and ethics reform has been undermined. Dealing with the state laws from the beginning could have made the ethics codes, and the ethics reform process, far better.

Numerous Ethics Provisions Declared Illegal in Kane County, IL

As if Florida hasn't had enough scandals lately, there is now a mess in Sarasota County, on Florida's Gulf Coast. The focus is on terrible procurement policies and procedures that apparently allowed a lot of unethical behavior to occur. But as is usually the case, the center of the problem appears to have been the adminstration's attitude. And that attitude seems to have come out in the negotiations over the county administrator's severance package.

An Environment of Intimidation and No-Bid Contracts