Ethics Codes & Reform

How you present an ethics provision can make all the difference. Take a pay-to-play ordinance proposed in Fort Wayne, which would limit the amount of contributions and gifts that can be given to city officials by an individual or entity if it wants to have a no-bid contract with the city. A council…

In my first post on Dennis Thompson's book Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption, I quoted him as saying, "What makes the conduct improper is institutional in the sense that it violates principles that promote the distinctive purposes of the institution." What are these pr…

My second volume of summer reading is a classic, Dennis F. Thompson's Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption (1995). Despite the book's title, Thompson (a professor at Harvard) has a great deal to say about government ethics that is equally applicable to city and county leg…

Election time can be a good time for local government ethics. Good government candidates spout all sorts of interesting ideas about ethics independence, budgeting, transparency, and the like, which are rarely heard between elections. Take, for example, Leland Yee, who is running for mayor of San Fr…

Monday evening, I learned about the serious consequences that can result from not giving ethics commission members a clear understanding of what government ethics is, and what it is not. The occasion was the consideration by the Democracy Fund board, which oversees the public campaign financing pro…

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 co…

Last August, I wrote a blog post about the mayor of Tulsa accepting free legal services from an attorney who represented Tulsa in certain matters, that is, from a city contractor. The matter involved the council possibly filing charges against the mayor for allegedly lying about a federal police gr…

In a letter to the editor in yesterday's New York Times, two lawyers who represent clients seeking to gut Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections public campaign financing program end by calling Arizona's program "a vision of unconstitutional dystopia, not free speech." I administer the public campaign …

Seeking Order in Government All government officials seek order, not just in the sense of law and order, but also in the sense of having everyone know their roles, their authority, and their relationships to other individuals and agencies. Nonviolent actors seek order in societies where some kinds …

In his book The Search for a Nonviolent Future, Michael N. Nagler wrote, "Anyone who plucks up the courage to offer an opponent a way out of their conflict can find herself or himself wielding an unexpected power." You may need to read this sentence over a few times before it completely sinks in. T…