Ethics Codes & Reform

According to an article in the Capital Gazette, a former Anne Arundel County (MD) county executive, who was convicted early this year of a misdemeanor for misconduct in office, wants to run for office again, despite the judge ordering, as part of the criminal penalty, that he not be permitted to ru…

Sendhil Mullainathan's new book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (Times Books) has been getting a lot of attention lately. Although I haven't read it yet, I was intrigued by Cass Sunstein's review of the book in the September 26 issue of the New York Review of Books. Sunstein focuses o…

Should the Josephson Institute's Five Principles of Public Ethics be enforceable by a local government? And if not, why not? Article I of Allen Park, MI's charter consists of the five Josephson Institute principles, plus one more about "congeniality and productivity." Here are the five Josephson pr…

It came to my attention in an interview with Professor James Svara, for a paper I am writing for the journal Public Integrity, that in March 2013, the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) made substantial — sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful, sometimes baffling — changes to its Co…

Gifts to a local official can fall between jurisdictional cracks, as shown in an article today in the New York Times. They can also fall between definitional cracks. And between these cracks it's gray. The article reports that, a couple of years ago, Newark NJ's mayor, Cory Booker, who is running f…

The greatly improved and expanded second edition of City Ethics' resource book Local Government Ethics Programs will be up on the City Ethics website this weekend. See the teaser:  a new list of Best Practices that is an appendix to the second edition.

In this, the third blog post on the Colorado ethics commission situation, I would like to look at the problems that can arise from placing an ethics code in a constitutional document, either a charter or, as in the Colorado case, the state constitution. It is an unfortunate fact that, in many juris…

I have done a poor job in this blog covering administrative ethics, that is, the field of study involving the professional conduct of public administrators. Writers on administrative ethics have done a poor job of covering government ethics, that is, the field of study involving conflicts of intere…

It can never be said too often that the quality of a government ethics code is meaningless. What matters is how the ethics program actually works. Take Bridgeport, CT for example. It is the largest city in Connecticut, with a population of 150,000. It is a poor city in a rich county, and it has had…

It's been six years since I last wrote about local government ethics in Tennessee. In a January 2007 comment to the forum on recusal, I focused on the fact that the University of Tennessee's Municipal Technical Advisory Service (MTAS) (which operates in cooperation with the Tennessee Municipal Leag…