Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

Update: September 27, 2011
According to Melissa Griffin's column in the Examiner yesterday, the board of supervisors' Government Audit and Oversight Committee met last week to discuss the civil grand jury report discussed below. The results of the committee consideration of the report are included after each relevant section below.

The San Francisco Ethics...

When an ethics commission and its staff are at odds, and the commission is dealing with complaints against high-level officials, it is always best for everyone when those officials had nothing to do with the selection of the ethics commission's members or its staff. In other words, you never fully appreciate an EC's independence, in terms of its selection process, until things get ugly. Things got ugly in Georgia this week.

An ethics controversy involving the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) has led to the resignation of four of the seven members of the APS ethics commission, a failure to replace them, and a threat to the schools' accreditation status.

On Friday, the Louisville ethics commission found that a council member intentionally violated several ethics provisions. This was its first major action under the city's new ethics code, which I wrote about last year. The EC gave the council member the most serious...

It's important for ethics commissions to be prepared for the occasional official who, along with his or her attorney, will do anything to stop or at least delay its investigation, including attacks on the EC itself. A good example of how relentless an official can be is John J. O'Connor, now former head of the SUNY Research Foundation, whom I wrote about in a recent blog post.

A report on the relationship between New York's state university system (SUNY) and the SUNY Research Foundation (RF) was published yesterday. What makes it of interest to this blog is the way the report emphasizes the personal nature of the management of the foundation, which distributes nearly a billion dollars a year in research grants almost exclusively to SUNY's many colleges and universities; the way it...