County Related

<b>Update: December 20, 2012</b> (see below)<br>
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It looks like outsourcing may finally come to local government
ethics. No, this doesn't mean that a city's hotline will be picked
up by someone in India (in fact, hotlines in some localities are
already outsourced to corporations). What it means is that the
ongoing failure of scandal-ridden San Bernardino County (CA) to come

Here's an interesting conflict situation out of Forsyth County,
Georgia. According to <a href="http://www.forsythnews.com/section/5/article/12553/&quot; target="”_blank”">an
article in the Forsyth <i>News</i></a>, a county commissioner owns a
company that buys county water and sells it to county residents who
used to have wells. The company owns the infrastructure that
supplies water to four subdivisions in the county. It is one of

On April 5, the county commission in Wayne County, MI (which includes Detroit) passed a new ethics
ordinance (attached; see below), following multiple scandals. It
contains many good provisions, but it does not create a government
ethics program. By this, I mean that it does not provide an
independent ethics commission, it does not provide for an ethics
officer or other independent staff member, it does not provide for ethics
training and only provides for written advice at an ethics board

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one
of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts
related to bringing false charges against other county officials over
a period of years, according to <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2012/04/10/20120…; target="”_blank”">an

<b>Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum</b><br>
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics
and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn
ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's
lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.<br>
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In Georgia, Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) are a creation of
state government (they're in the amended 1984 state constitution)
that involves local governments in serious potential conflicts of
interest, in order to allow developers to fund their public
infrastructure with tax-free bonds. CIDs are a clever idea, but
cleverness is often inconsistent with government ethics. Smith,

It's not every day that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/nyregion/political-links-seen-behind-…; target="”_blank”">an
article about an insufficiently bid county contract</a> appears on the
front page of a major newspaper, but that's what happened today with
the New York <i>Times</i>.<br>
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<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/taking-state-laws-account-when-drafti…; target="”_blank”">Last
week, I wrote</a> about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision
invalidating a Montgomery County's ethics code to the extent it applied to the
employees of independent agencies, such as the district attorney's
office.<br>
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It is important to take state laws into account when drafting ethics
provisions, especially in local governments that do not have home rule
charters. Here are two situations in the news where this was not done,
and ethics reform has been undermined. Dealing with the state laws from the beginning could have made the ethics codes, and the ethics reform process, far better.<br>
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As if Florida hasn't had enough scandals lately, there is now a mess in
Sarasota County, on Florida's Gulf Coast. The focus is on terrible
procurement policies and procedures that apparently allowed a lot of
unethical behavior to occur. But as is usually the case, the center of
the problem appears to have been the adminstration's attitude. And that attitude seems to have come out in the negotiations over the county administrator's severance package.<br>
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