Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

There are many perils of an inadequate local government ethics code, as can be seen in Colorado Springs, which passed an ethics code in 2007. Last week, I wrote a blog entry about the new ethics commission's first complaint. Even before the ethics commission has met on the complaint, problems have arisen, according to...

Updates below (latest on August 11, 2009)
There's an interesting situation in Colorado Springs. According to an article in yesterday's Colorado Springs Gazette, an ethics complaint filed against the city's weak mayor alleged that the mayor was an investment adviser to a developer...

Yesterday, the Rhode Island Supreme Court held oral arguments on the appeal of the RI legislative immunity decision. I want to focus on two important issues that arose in the oral arguments, according to an article in the Providence Journal. But...

Local government officials often defend halfway ethics reforms by saying that they're just the beginning, and that something is better than nothing. But halfway reforms are often effectively little more than nothing, especially in the area of enforcement. "Window dressing" is one term for such reforms. "Paper tiger" is another.

Requiring supermajority votes by ethics commissions to find probable cause or a violation is probably the best obstacle elected officials can place in the way of effective ethics enforcement. This is especially true of the probable cause phase, if there is one.

Anonymous complaints are both important and problematic. Without anonymous tips and hotlines, our justice system would not work nearly as well as it does. With ethics programs, officials involved in unethical conduct often have great power in the community, and the people who know what they are doing are often the very people most vulnerable to their retribution.

And yet there is an air of cowardice around anonymous complaints, possibly even moreso now that people make anonymous...