Contractors and Vendors

The Supreme Court reached a decision today in the Carrigan case, and it is nearly unanimous. However, it deals with only one part of the arguments made by Carrigan (see my blog post on the oral argument): whether a...

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the front page of the New York Times the following day. Yesterday, in a post called "Privatization and Transparency," I discussed new types of privatization involving nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit operates government-funded facilities or programs, such as schools. These nonprofits are...

I've written a little about ethics issues involving quasi-governmental entities and private entities doing government work (oversight, misuse, and personal financial disclosure). But there are...

As discussed in an earlier blog post, eighteen months ago the Dallas council, under the prodding of the mayor at the time, passed some ethics reforms. According to a Dallas News editorial last month, only six months later the council backed off...

Good news:  Westminster is not alone. No, I am not referring to the British Parliament or the New York dog show. I am referring to the Westminster, CO law that says that a campaign contributor has a relationship with the recipient of a sizeable campaign contribution that gives rise to a conflict of interest and requires the recipient's withdrawal from participation in any matter involving the contributor (see my blog post on...

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.