Blogs

Small towns don't need lobbying registration, because no lobbying of any consequence occurs there.

Small towns don't need lobbying registration, because no lobbying of any consequence occurs there.

Say it often enough — as local government and lobbying associations do — and people believe it's true. But it's not. And here's a good example why.

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 member who owns a hot dog stand pushed to have the town's street vendor law changed so that street...

The mayor of Miami-Dade County has announced the formation of a Procurement Review Task Force to, according to his May 6 memo (attached; see below), "improve and simplify our procurement process."

The principal goals of the task force are:

To ensure that all procurements continue to be conducted with the maximum level of transparency, fairness and integrity."

To "make procurement more efficient, easier to navigate for vendors," in other words, to...

One of the areas where government ethics laws are weakest is the indirect relationship, such as when a gift is given not to an official, but to an official's spouse or child; an official's business relationship is not with a developer, but with the owner of the developer's parent; an official's aide participates on a recused official's behalf; or an official participates in a contract matter when she has a family relationship with the owner of a subcontractor that is not directly involved in...

Many government ethics professionals don't like waivers. I think they're valuable. Basically, they are requests for an advisory opinion in which the official recognizes that certain conduct would constitute an ethics violation, but wants a determination that he can engage in the conduct due to special circumstances. The result of such a determination is the creation of a new, narrow exception to a rule. This is a good way of preventing bad unforeseen consequences of a rule. But waivers must be...

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 interesting conflict issue relating not only to hiring...