City Related

A must-read for lobbying reformers! A series of fascinating
amendments that were made to New York City's lobbying law last
December will take effect this month. There are some reforms here
that I've never seen anywhere else, and they raise some issues that
need to be more widely discussed.<br>
<br>
The amendments, made in Local Law 129 (attached; see below), are

Sometimes even a wrongheaded ethics complaint can do good, by
showing how wrongheaded a town's government
ethics program is.<br>
<br>
According to <a href="http://www.theday.com/article/20140512/OP01/305129991&quot; target="”_blank”">an
editorial in <i>The Day</i> this week</a>, the head of a local
political party, Independence for Montville, filed an ethics

According to <a href="http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140501/BLOGS04/140509993/speaker…; target="”_blank”">a
post in the <i>Crain</i>'s Insider blog last week</a>, the New
York City council hired as deputy general counsel a lobbyist whose

There is nothing more natural and, in most circumstances, ethical
than a mother doing her best to help her son when he is in trouble.
And yet, in most jurisdictions, there are multiple government ethics
laws that prohibit this very conduct when the mother is a government
official. This is as good an example as there is of the fact that
government ethics is not about ethical conduct in general, but
rather about government fiduciaries dealing responsibly with their
conflicts of interest.<br>
<br>

Ethics reform can take the oddest forms, especially when those doing
it put on blinders and consider nothing but the situation before
them, thereby failing to consider best practices or, in fact, the
practices of any other jurisdiction.<br>
<br>
This is the kind of ethics reform that recently happened in Park
Ridge, IL, a suburb of Chicago with 37,000 inhabitants. According to

How much jurisdiction need a government ethics program have over
procurement matters when there is a procurement program dealing with
them? This question, common to all cities and counties, is being
asked in Honolulu, with respect to the Honolulu
Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART), which will be
soon awarding about a billion dollars in contracts.<br>
<br>

States can make life difficult for local government ethics programs.
For example, according to<a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/sun-investigates/bs-md-sun-in…; target="”_blank”">
an article in the Baltimore <i>Sun</i> on Sunday</a>, in Maryland, local governments
have to use the same rules for access to ethics disclosures as the

According to <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/tables-turn-as-pol…; target="”_blank”">an
article this week in the St. Louis <i>Post-Dispatch</a>,</i>
the new mayor of Poplar Bluff, MO is a gadfly who had been totally
ignored when she questioned the dealings of her town government.

Here's an interesting conflict situation from Louisiana that
involves a good intra-governmental revolving door provision and unforeseen circumstances. According to
<a href="http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/8983032-171/state-ethics-staf…; target="”_blank”">an
article today in the <i>Advocate</a>,</i>
the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board made the wise decision to

Because Massachusetts has one of the better state ethics programs with
jurisdiction over local officials, there
are very few local ethics programs, unlike the situation in Florida,
California, or Texas, for example.<br>
<br>
But there have been some recent ethics reform efforts at the local level. Most recently, according to