Recusal/Withdrawal

One thing I've failed to do in this blog is sufficiently emphasize that making ethical decisions in government is not primarily about being a good, ethical person, as most people seem to think. Essentially, it is the same as making other decisions. As I  recently wrote, "with effective training, in an ethical environment, government ethics should be just another professional routine."

It's Election Day 2009, so what better topic than a particularly slimy instance of negative campaigning that attacks a candidate for seeking an advisory opinion from the local ethics board, and actually following it.

According to an article on kcrg.com this Sunday, a candidate's flier said that his incumbent Cedar Rapids city council opponent “had been accused of ethics violations and appeared before the...

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 reduction in contributions to the pension plan, the pension board members acted in their personal interest and against the interest of...

Here are two interesting local government ethics case studies from matters in the news this week.

A Job Can Effectively Be a Gift
According to an article in the Spokesman-Review, a Spokane council member requested an advisory opinion from the city's ethics committee after his successful push to change city regulations to allow bus bench...

One problem in government ethics is that when conflict situations are dealt with responsibly, there is rarely a record of them. They pass quietly, failing to end up in the newspaper, at an ethics commission, or in court. So generally we're stuck learning from the times when conflict situations are dealt with irresponsibly. One of these situations, in Wausau, Wisconsin, made it to court, and a decision this week by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin sets the facts out...

How can a lawyer responsibly deal with the following situation? A former city attorney, he has been general counsel to the city's sports authority, which oversees three major sports with three stadiums (and there's talk of a fourth, which the lawyer has publicly supported). The lawyer is also special counsel to the city's transit and port...