City Related | City Ethics

Ethics Codes & Reform May 20, 2014

Some Excellent Lobbying Reforms in NYC

A must-read for lobbying reformers! A series of fascinating amendments that were made to New York City's lobbying law last December will take effect this month. There are some reforms here that I've never seen anywhere else, and they raise some issues that need to be more widely discussed. The amen…

Enforcement & Complaints May 14, 2014

Ethics Self-Regulation Exposed by Ethics Complaint

Sometimes even a wrongheaded ethics complaint can do good, by showing how wrongheaded a town's government ethics program is. According to an editorial in The Day this week, the head of a local political party, Independence for Montville, filed an ethics complaint alleging that a former council memb…

Ethics Codes & Reform May 7, 2014

The Separation of Lobbying and Campaign Services

According to a post in the Crain's Insider blog last week, the New York City council hired as deputy general counsel a lobbyist whose firm recently had been the council speaker's campaign consultant (the speaker is the leader of the NY city council, elected by its members). This raises an interesti…

Conflicts of Interest May 7, 2014

A Mother Helping Her Son, and Government "Ethics"

There is nothing more natural and, in most circumstances, ethical than a mother doing her best to help her son when he is in trouble. And yet, in most jurisdictions, there are multiple government ethics laws that prohibit this very conduct when the mother is a government official. This is as good a…

Ethics Codes & Reform May 6, 2014

The Wrong Kind of Ethics Reform in Park Ridge, IL

Ethics reform can take the oddest forms, especially when those doing it put on blinders and consider nothing but the situation before them, thereby failing to consider best practices or, in fact, the practices of any other jurisdiction. This is the kind of ethics reform that recently happened in Pa…

Ethics Commissions & Administration May 5, 2014

EC Jurisdiction Over Agency Procurement and Contractors

How much jurisdiction need a government ethics program have over procurement matters when there is a procurement program dealing with them? This question, common to all cities and counties, is being asked in Honolulu, with respect to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART), which wil…

Transparency & Disclosure May 1, 2014

Opening Up Access to Ethics Disclosure

States can make life difficult for local government ethics programs. For example, according to an article in the Baltimore Sun on Sunday, in Maryland, local governments have to use the same rules for access to ethics disclosures as the state does. And the state's rules are designed to prevent acces…

Conflicts of Interest April 25, 2014

Sitting on a Board with Restricted Sources

According to an article this week in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the new mayor of Poplar Bluff, MO is a gadfly who had been totally ignored when she questioned the dealings of her town government. This is generally a sign of a very poor ethics environment. One of the problems she wants to deal wit…

Conflicts of Interest April 24, 2014

Following the Spirit of an Intra-Governmental Revolving Door Law in Louisiana

Here's an interesting conflict situation from Louisiana that involves a good intra-governmental revolving door provision and unforeseen circumstances. According to an article today in the Advocate, the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board made the wise decision to ask the state ethics board, which ha…

April 16, 2014

Local Ethics Reform in Massachusetts

Because Massachusetts has one of the better state ethics programs with jurisdiction over local officials, there are very few local ethics programs, unlike the situation in Florida, California, or Texas, for example. But there have been some recent ethics reform efforts at the local level. Most rece…

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