Local Government Attorneys

According to an official press release, yesterday the mayor of Phoenix announced the formation of an Ethics Review Ad Hoc Task Force, with eleven members appointed by the mayor, to be chaired by former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley and staffed by the city’s law and human resources departments.

The worst recommendation in the Chicago ethics task force's second report (attached; see below) involves the role it wants the corporation counsel to play in the city's ethics program: prosecuting attorney.

I feel strongly that a corporation counsel's office should play no role in an ethics program. See the section of my book Local Government Ethics Programs...

Although the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force, in its first report, came out strongly in favor of more transparency in government, in its second report it came out strongly in favor of what it calls "...

Update: Counsel for the Housing Authority informed me that it was the Authority board, through him, that originally notified HUD of problems, and that another counsel was involved in some of the relevant transactions. Therefore, I have made some changes to the original post.

An editorial in today's New Haven Register sets forth allegations about the West...

In a long cover story in last week's Fort Worth Weekly, Peter Gorman looked at the state of government ethics in Fort Worth and, most important, some proposed changes to its ethics program that take it in the wrong direction. Since it was the only article on the proposals, and Gorman paraphrased me often (based on an interview), I was waiting for other local newspapers to jump in and confirm what Gorman...

An interesting question arose in an ethics proceeding in Kennesaw, GA, a city of 30,000 just outside of Atlanta. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a Kennesaw Watch blog post, both dated July 17, soon after an ethics complaint was filed against the city's mayor, the mayor...