Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

Let me take a logical approach to the topic of government ethics proceeding confidentiality before I look at what has been happening in Utah this last week.

There's a lot of ethics news from San Diego today. First, the judge in the San Diego campaign finance case has clarified his ruling.

Second, the case involving the former president of the Center City Development Corp. is going to a hearing before the San Diego ethics...

Special Counsel Robert S. Bennett's report on the District of Columbia council's earmark grants and personal services contracts was made public yesterday by the Washington...

Update: February 19, 2010 (see below)

This blog post is about Chicago, and things are more complicated in Chicago than in other American municipalities. So please read slowly and carefully.

According to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, the first deputy in the mayor's Office of Compliance resigned a few weeks after...

Update: December 10, 2010 (see below)

After all I've written about the immunity courts have given legislators from enforcement actions by ethics commissions, I now can write about a court decision that gives ethics commissions and their staff immunity from suits by respondents in ethics enforcement actions, in this case one for defamation against an ethics board's executive director. The respondent in this case, however, is not a legislator, but a losing candidate for...

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 the city of Torrington (CT; pop. 36,000). There's also a lesson to be learned about the confidentiality of ethics commission decisions.