On today's Palm Beach County (FL) Board of Commissioners <a href="http://www.pbcgov.com/PubInf/Agenda/agenda.pdf&quot; target="”_blank”">agenda</a> is
approval of an Interlocal Agreement with the city of Lake Worth. The
agreement is one of many that will be entered into between cities and
towns in the county to give the county ethics commission jurisdiction
over the municipalities' ethics training, advice, disclosure, and

Oxytocin is a hormone released by the hypothalamus portion of the brain
which, among other things, makes people trust each other more. In other
words, one could argue that local government ethics seeks to increase
the release of oxytocin in the brains of people when they think about
their local government.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11hormone.html&quot; target="”_blank”">An

This second blog post on the briefs filed concerning whether the
Carrigan case should be accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court glances at
arguments in the briefs filed by the two parties and then makes a different argument for why the First Amendment has no place in this sort of government ethics matter. Making this argument gets to the root of how the Constitution, and government ethics, protect the public. If only the courts would let the Constitution and government ethics work together, as they should, instead of placing them at loggerheads.<br>
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<b>Note:</b> I made a few important changes to this blog post on January 10, in conjunction with the posting of my analysis of the parties' briefs in this case.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.nevadajudiciary.us/index.php/advancedopinions/785-carrigan-v…; target="”_blank”">The Nevada Supreme Court's

<a href="http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20110106/OPINION01/101060319">An
editorial
in yesterday's <i>Star Press</i></a> of east central Indiana calls
for passage of a state law to prevent municipal employees from sitting on a
body that oversees their department or agency's budget. The focus is
primarily on preventing city and county workers from sitting on city
and county councils.<br>
<br>

It not only takes a number of officials to allow unethical conduct to
occur, it also takes a number of officials to undermine the effect of a
good ethics program. An ugly example occurred recently in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Providence,_RI">North
Providence, Rhode Island</a>, a city where three former council members

Local government vendor or supplier codes of conduct are not commonly found
in the U.S. In a limited search, I couldn't find one. But corporations commonly have them, as do some Canadian cities and some states
and state agencies. And they sound like a good idea.<br>
<br>
The reason I raise this idea is that Cuyahoga County's new county

Cuyahoga County, OH, which includes Cleveland, has been the site of a
large number of arrests of government officials, contractors, and

Sometimes concepts derived from one area of study, for one purpose, can
be valuable in another area of study, for another purpose. This is true
of the concepts of "injunctive norm" and "descriptive norm" derived by social psychology professor Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University for
use in the area of persuading people not to do certain things, such as litter.<br>
<br>

One Moore County (NC) commissioner has been faced with two conflict of
interest matters in 2010, one of which led him to recently resign
from a board. Although the two have nothing to do with each other, they
have become politically intertwined which, along with the lack of an ethics program, has prevented the
responsible handling of the conflicts.<br>
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