Contractors and Vendors

Two important issues arise from a story about a competitive bid for a concrete contract for an arena in Louisville which, according to an article in yesterday's Louisville Courier-Journal, was won by a company solely owned by a member of the state task force that chose the site, the chair of the board that manages the arena, a close friend of the coach of the arena's primary tenant, and a...

I find it fascinating that, although kickbacks (also known as "thanks giving") are one of the central elements of unethical conduct in local governments, I have only mentioned them three times in my blog posts.

Kickbacks are a dirty secret for one principal reason:  they are difficult to prove. Along with bribes, they require hard-to-obtain proof to tie money to conduct. Coincidentally, these are the two forms of conduct that the Supreme Court, in...

The spread of corruption from local to state to national is often ignored. And when corruption is discovered, there is much litigation. In fact, it's often hard to see corruption clearly here in the U.S. That's why the occasional look at corruption abroad is useful, like looking in an only slightly distorted mirror.

Indefinite conflicts can cause a lot of problems for officials. They see them as not yet ripe, not something they should have to deal with yet. But others see them as looming in the future, and want to know how the official plans to deal with them. One such indefinite conflict is the subject of controversy in Tampa, where a council candidate is the executive director of a nonprofit organization that has a large contract with the city to build affordable apartments. This sort of indefinite...

Another interesting ethics matter is raised in the article on the school board member in Santa Clara County (CA), which I discussed earlier today.

The DA's office notes that the contractor, for whom the school board member had worked as...

There are three basic approaches to enforcing ethics laws:  through ethics commissions, through the criminal process, and through the ballot box. I strongly oppose using the criminal process for ethics violations (see an earlier blog post), and feel that the ballot box is far too crude a way to enforce ethics laws, especially considering that voters do not have the facts or know the laws.

A situation in Santa Clara...