Local Government Practice

The land deals of Congressman Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar, CA) could provide fodder for numerous blog entries on various topics. I wrote about him and ethics recidivism, to show how important it is to deal with a local politician's unethical actions so that they don't turn into much bigger ones as he rises through the ranks.

Now I'd like to look at a way in which municipal officials, feeling they're helping out, enable unethical conduct.

This Sunday New York Times' front-page feature on how doctors are recognizing the value (ethical and financial) of apologizing provides a good opportunity to bring up again what I consider to be one of the most important topics in local government ethics.

The city of Vallejo, California (pop. 117,000) is about to file for bankruptcy, primarily, it appears, to allow it to void union contracts and have a bankruptcy judge rather than negotiations work out a new contract. Sajan George, an adviser to struggling public entities, has said, "There's a wave of this coming across the U.S. What happens in Vallejo could definitely set a precedent."

Form of government issues are not generally considered to be part of government ethics.  But they are intertwined in important ways.

This can be seen from the New York City Council slush fund scandal.  According to an article in today's New York Times, it began when the Board of Estimate, a finance board in charge of writing the budget, was abolished in the charter revision of 1989.  This gave control of the budget to the Council.

There is one local government conflict of interest that is often ignored because it was created at the federal level by a federal statute. The statute is known as the Hatch Act of 1939 (Title 5, Subchapter III), originally known as An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities (they don’t make statute names like they used to). The Hatch Act limits the political activities of local government employees who are principally employed by programs funded in whole or in part by the U.S.

Has your city’s government grown up yet, ethically speaking? This isn't as silly a question as it sounds. All of us develop morally, just as we develop physically and intellectually and emotionally. We just don’t see our height grow or get university degrees or get married and have children, ethically speaking. The same is true of municipal governments, according to James S. Bowman in his essay “The Ethical Professional,” which appears in The Ethics Edge, ed. Jonathan P. West and Evan M.

It's difficult to show clearly that ethical government correlates with ethical conduct. However, last year Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel came up with a study that does this: They studied parking tickets given to United Nations diplomats in Manhattan. Because, until 2002, there was zero enforcement of parking rules for diplomats, they were given a carte blanche or, if you will, were tempted to act unethically (breaking rules for private gain when enforcement is not a consideration).

Whenever someone dies in a village in Bangladesh, Gonoshasthaya Kendra, a health charity, holds a public post-mortem, according to an article in the July 7, 2007 issue of the Economist.

If you had no knowledge of government ethics, and you were asked what, on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, was the most frequent form of unethical behavior in municipal government, you might say 'passing rumors along.' That's the meat and the potatoes of every organization's conversations, and it's only the most self-controlled of us who don't partake in producing, consuming, and passing along rumors, at least occasionally. We know rumor mongering is wrong, even as we do it. But rarely does it have devastating consequences (we assure ourselves, if we think about it at all).

I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics. The book looks at cultures that have been devastated by having their way of life destroyed.