Advisory Opinions

I have done a poor job in this blog covering administrative ethics,
that is, the field of study involving the professional conduct of
public administrators. Writers on administrative ethics have done a
poor job of covering government ethics, that is, the field of study
involving conflicts of interest. Although the two fields overlap,
they exist in mostly separate worlds.  For example,
rarely does an administrative ethics professor show up at a Council
on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) conference, and my work (among

[Note: I have made changes throughout this blog post, based on a February 25 e-mail message from the COG executive director]<br>
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It should feel good when a pet idea of yours becomes a reality.
My pet idea is the regional ethics program, whose biggest
successes have been of the countywide variety, such as Miami-Dade
County and Palm Beach County, FL (there is also a Broward County
program, but it is run by an inspector general). There are a few
regional ethics commissions in Kentucky, and one in

Some very interesting issues arise out of a past (and present)
conflict situation that has become an issue in this week's mayoral
primary in the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas
City, KS ("UG").<br>
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The conflict situation appears simple at first glance, but it is not. In 2007, a UG commissioner
became the paid executive director of the <a href="http://andakck.org/&quot; target="”_blank”">Argentine Neighborhood Development

<b>Simplifying Self-Supervision</b><br>
In their book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752/&quot; target="”_blank”">Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard</a></i> (Crown, 2010), Chip
and Dan Heath note that self-control or, more accurately,
self-supervision is an exhaustible resource. What looks like

<b>Note:</b> When I originally wrote this blog post, I erroneously assumed that the ethics commission member whose conflict situation I discuss was the only one selected by the assembly speaker. I since learned that three of the members were selected by the assembly speaker. I would argue, therefore, that these three members are in the same situation (except for the personal opinion expressed about someone who would presumably be involved in the matter). With a fourteen-member commission, the withdrawal of three members from a matter would not hamper consideration of it.

<br>In their book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752/&quot; target="”_blank”">Switch:

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It's rare to find a newspaper article that truly appreciates the
work a city ethics officer does. So I'm including the entire article
below. It's <a href="http://members.jacksonville.com/news/premium-news/2012-12-26/story/jack…
the Jacksonville <i>Times-Union</i></a>, and Jacksonville's ethics officer happens

I'm a big supporter of making ethics commissions independent of
those over whom they have jurisdiction. Milton, Georgia and, now,
Forsyth County, Georgia have come up with an interesting approach to
ethics commission independence that has one good point and several
bad points.<br>
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The <a href="http://www.ajc.com/news/news/forsyth-county-reconstructs-ethics-board-t…; target="”_blank”">recent

It's been six years since I last wrote about local government ethics in Tennessee. In <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/mc/ci/recusal&quot; target="”_blank”">a January 2007
comment to the forum on recusal</a>, I focused on the fact that
the University of Tennessee's Municipal Technical Advisory Service
(MTAS) (which operates in cooperation with the Tennessee Municipal

No one wants a political government ethics program, and yet the
people who most often worry out loud that it will be political want
it to be political. This apparent paradox can be explained by looking at the
various meanings of the word "political." Which of these meanings is
most important to a government ethics program, and which of them
are, well, "just politics"? And what can a government ethics program do to lessen politics?<br>
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