In May I wrote a blog post about a so-called ethics emergency in Corpus Christi,
declared by a lame-duck council at its last meeting. This so-called emergency was the excuse for pushing through ethics
reforms without running them by the city's ethics commission or allowing public discussion. The new
council quickly suspended the reforms, pending review by the ethics
commission.
At least that was the excuse the new council used...
John
Hazlehurst's observation on the Colorado Springs ethics
commission's dismissal of a complaint against the mayor is valuable
enough to deserve a separate blog post, rather than a mere update to my original post on
this topic.
An important issue involved the mayor's insistence that, as an
investment adviser, he could...
Again, a very public federal conflict of interest matter provides
valuable material relevant to local government ethics. This
time it's former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr.'s
relationship with the firm he formerly headed, Goldman Sachs, the
subject of a
front-page story in Sunday's New York Times.
It may be midsummer, but it's still a busy season for local government
ethics. Here's how a few local governments are dealing with ethics
reform.
Palm Beach County commissioners agreed to create an inspector general
and ethics commission, according to an
article in the Palm Beach Post.
The commission says it will ask voters in November 2010...
Open Records Requests and
Ethics Proceedings
In an unusual twist on the confidentiality of ethics proceedings,
counsel for the Colorado Springs mayor's former client, the person who gave rise to the mayor's apparent conflict of interest, has made an open records
request for all documents related to the ethics proceeding against the
mayor, according to an
article in the Colorado...
While so many local governments don't take conflicts seriously enough
to require recusal, some take conflicts too seriously, and overreact.
This appears to be what happened in Elizabethtown (NY), according to an
article in yesterday's Press-Republican.