Ethics Commissions & Administration

A "placeholder" is someone who agrees to run on a ticket with a mayoral candidate or be appointed by him, but has no interest or intention in actually doing the work required by the position. Such a candidate does not attend many meetings of the body to which she was elected (often she is not even in town much of the year) and, when she does attend, is usually not prepared. When her support is needed, she will sometimes read a short speech prepared for her by someone else.

The Colorado ethics commission matter that I discussed in my last blog post points to yet another reason why ethics commissions must have their own counsel, and a sufficient budget to pay that counsel.

Does a former ethics commission member have a special obligation not to make misstatements with respect to government ethics matters? This question arose from a 2010 case in Florida I just came across, where the state senate president hired a former chair of the state ethics commission as his attorney.

Note: When I originally wrote this blog post, I erroneously assumed that the ethics commission member whose conflict situation I discuss was the only one selected by the assembly speaker. I since learned that three of the members were selected by the assembly speaker. I would argue, therefore, that these three members are in the same situation (except for the personal opinion expressed about someone who would presumably be involved in the matter). With a fourteen-member commission, the withdrawal of three members from a matter would not hamper consideration of it.

I learned this week that the board I administered until last July, the New Haven Democracy Fund board (the Fund is a public campaign financing program for the city's mayoral election), no longer has enough members to hold an official meeting. The seven-member board has three members, and it needs four members to have a quorum.

It's rare to find a newspaper article that truly appreciates the work a city ethics officer does. So I'm including the entire article below. It's from the Jacksonville Times-Union, and Jacksonville's ethics officer happens to be City Ethics President Carla Miller. Had it been anyone else, I would have run the article right away.

Here's an odd ethics program rule. According to an article last week in the Advocate-Messenger, the Boyle County, KY ethics commission, which has jurisdiction over all the municipalities in the county, requires that a town council vote on whether a matter may be referred to the ethics commission.

One government ethics question that does not have a general answer is whether boards of education or school systems are under the jurisdiction of city or county ethics programs. The answer is sometimes, but generally not.

There are several reasons for this. One is that many, probably most school systems have different boundaries than cities and counties. Generally, these are regional, including all or parts of multiple cities, towns, and counties.

I'm a big supporter of making ethics commissions independent of those over whom they have jurisdiction. Milton, Georgia and, now, Forsyth County, Georgia have come up with an interesting approach to ethics commission independence that has one good point and several bad points.

Update: December 19, 2012 (see below)