Local Government Practice

India and China have not only been the home of new varieties of entrepreneurialism. In these countries, creative individuals have also come up with novel approaches to dealing with local government corruption. An expatriate Indian physics professor in the U.S. came up with the brilliant idea of a Z…

When the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives says, "the American people don’t care about process" in a news conference (the context was the process surrounding the health care bill), this topic, which is central not only to government ethics, but to our legal and political system, is worth…

Update: February 3, 2010 (see below) A NC Local Government Blog post yesterday made me aware that there have recently been some very public conflict of interest issues involving North Carolina's alcoholic beverage control (ABC) system, the state liquor sales program, which allows each city and coun…

Assuming you can learn a lot from the mistakes made in local government ethics matters in cities and towns other than your own, there is a great deal to learn from a simple ethics matter that, through a number of mistakes, oversights and, apparently, partisanship has been turned into a big issue in…

It's been over three years since I wrote about the conflict situation of San Diego's pension board. Its members were selected by the city government labor unions and by the city, and they worked for the city. When an increase in their retirement benefits was explicitly tied to their approval of a r…

I've talked about legal defense funds in the past as a way to accept large gifts from those doing business with a local government, but I referred, tangentially, to only one local government legal defense fund, that of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. So I did some research and came up with a…

Should elected officials be held to a higher standard than ordinary people? And if so, who should decide? These questions are central to a dispute that has been simmering for two years in El Paso. According to an article in the El Paso Times yesterday, the local district attorney would not allow a …

Privatizing local government functions can cause conflict of interest problems, but at least contractors can be held to contracts and replaced when they run afoul of ethics or other laws or requirements. The same is not necessarily true when non-profit organizations take over local government funct…

A new argument has been made in the legislative immunity part of the case against a Baltimore council member who is now the mayor. In a memorandum to dismiss a new indictment (attached; see below), filed on September 8, the mayor has argued, on pages 3-10, that testimony by someone who attended eve…

If you want to encourage unethical behavior, give individual officials independent power over the sorts of decisions where people have the greatest incentive to tempt officials, and officials are in the best position to enforce pay-to-play. I described a good example of this in a recent blog post a…