City Related

Today, I received a copy of the <a href="http://www.dallascityhall.com/council_briefings/agendas/agendas_0812/Fi…; target="”_blank”">Dallas
City Council agenda addendum for its August 22 meeting</a>.
This addendum contains (pp. 11-17) extensive information about a
large ($434,495) contract for "the assessment of the City’s current ethics
guidelines and the development of an ethics training program." City

<br><a href="http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/sites/default/files/Report%20of%20the%20…; target="”_blank”">The second report of the Chicago Ethics Reform Task Force</a> came out

<b>Update:</b> Counsel for the Housing Authority informed me that it was the Authority board, through him, that originally notified HUD of problems, and that another counsel was involved in some of the relevant transactions. Therefore, I have made some changes to the original post.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://nhregister.com/articles/2012/08/24/opinion/doc5036b9651ddb484388…; target="”_blank”">An

In <a href="http://www.fwweekly.com/2012/08/15/chipping-away/&quot; target="”_blank”">a
long cover story in last week's Fort Worth <i>Weekly</i></a>, Peter
Gorman looked at the state of government ethics in Fort Worth and,
most important, some proposed changes to its ethics program that
take it in the wrong direction. Since it was the only article on the proposals, and Gorman

(<b>Note:</b> This post has been revised, based on a response from Steve Berlin, executive director of Chicago's ethics board. I had made the silly assumption that the underlined language in the ethics reform ordinance was new. It turns out that much of that language has been there for some time. So I've deleted some comments and made changes to others.)<br>
<br>
Recently, the Chicago council passed a series of ethics reforms
(attached; see below) in response to the first report of the city's

Should council members do business with each other or with the
mayor? Another way to put this question is, does their doing business together give rise to a
conflict of interest?<br>
<br>
The situation that gave rise to these questions came out recently in

<b>Update</b>: August 9, 2012 (see below)<br>
<br>
People tend to think that all good government people are alike. The
thinking goes that those who favor the improvement of ethics
programs also favor such things as term limits, referendums and
initiatives, and pension forfeiture by those found to have violated
the public's trust. As a matter of fact, I don't favor any of these other good
government approaches.<br>
<br>
The one I want to talk about in this blog

Here's an all too common scenario:  A local government
creates an ethics program after a scandal, and time passes either
without another scandal or with a change of administration. The new
administration sees the ethics program as unnecessary, and decides
not to fund the program and not to replace ethics commission members who resign
or whose terms run out. The ethics program remains on the books, but
there is no training, advice, disclosure, or enforcement of the

It's always disheartening to see high-level officials
misuse an ethics program for the sake of personal revenge or, as the official says in
the case I'm looking at here, to get "my name cleared."<br>
<br>
According to <a href="http://www.statesman.com/news/local/former-mayor-files-ethics-complaint…; target="”_blank”">an

<b>A Complex School Board Conflict Situation</b><br>
Should someone closely associated with an organization that has been awarded a sizeable preschool contract be prevented from sitting on a school board when the
contract was not with the school board? That is
one of the questions raised by <a href="http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Bridgeport-ed-board-member-denies-c…; target="”_blank”">an