Conflicts

According to an investigative article on Nashville's WTVF-TV site yesterday evening, a former property assessor had help from a developer in disposing of her home and buying one from the developer, and also undervalued nine of the developer's properties by a total of $9.5 million over three years.

Read all about it! Local government ethics becomes a presidential campaign issue! Yes, you heard that right. According to CBS News, this very day presidential candidate Mitt Romney said "the person sitting across the table from [a teachers union] should not have received the largest campaign contribution from the teachers union themselves...

Local government ethics can quickly become an ugly circus when officials don't really understand it. A good example occurred in Royal Oak, Michigan last week, when a city commissioner who had recently pointed out a legitimate conflict situation involving a fellow commissioner took an "ethics pledge" at a commission meeting, without any warning, and then asked that the commissioners agree to take the pledge at the beginning of every meeting, according to...

According to Dan Lett's column in the Winnipeg Free Press yesterday, when a conflict of interest issue arises with respect to Winnipeg's mayor, his first response is to shrug his shoulders. If that works, that's the end of the matter.

Now that I am no longer administrator of the New Haven Democracy Fund, a public campaign financing program, I can once again write about ethics issues that arise in New Haven. An interesting issue arose when, according to an article in Monday's New Haven Register, a member of the city's ethics board took a part-time job with the city. The questions this raises are (1)...

The worst recommendation in the Chicago ethics task force's second report (attached; see below) involves the role it wants the corporation counsel to play in the city's ethics program: prosecuting attorney.

I feel strongly that a corporation counsel's office should play no role in an ethics program. See the section of my book Local Government Ethics Programs...