Contractors and Vendors

This week saw the opening of the trial of former New York state senate majority leader Joseph Bruno for honest services fraud. According to the assistant U.S. attorney presenting the case, as quoted in the Albany Times-Union, although a criminal trial, "this case is about conflicts of interest. It's about failure to disclose conflicts of interest, and it's about concealment of information that...

While on the subject of pension boards in California, it's worth mentioning a new California bill, Bill 1584, signed into law on October 18. It is an amendment to the County Employees Retirement Law of 1937 (Section 22212.5 of the Education Code, Sections 20098 and 31528 of the Government Code, with the addition of Sections 7508.5, 7513.8, 7513.85, 7513.9, and 7513.95 to...

Dallas council members' control over development in their districts led earlier this month to the conviction of one council member and four associates for extortion.

Now the Dallas mayor, Tom Leppert, is effectively forcing the hand of the city council to enact...

According to an article in this week's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a rule prohibiting Georgia state employees from accepting gifts over $25 is not being enforced. At all.

How does the paper know these gifts are being made? Because lobbyists have to disclose their spending on state employees as well as on legislators (who are not restricted from taking such gifts). Governor...

Update: November 11, 2009 (see below)

Is there any worse way to skirt government ethics rules and misuse public money and position than via a charitable organization? And yet it happens again and again. This time it happened in Baltimore, according to the results of an extensive investigation by the Baltimore Sun.

I've talked about legal defense funds in the past as a way to accept large gifts from those doing business with a local government, but I referred, tangentially, to only one local government legal defense fund, that of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. So I did some research and came up with a few other examples, which are worth knowing about if the...