Contractors and Vendors

Update: April 29, 2010 (see below)

The idea of a possible conflict of interest should not be an excuse for a fishing expedition to find relationships between local government legislators and people or contracts they vote on. This appears to be what is happening in Crossville, a town of 9,000 in east-central Tennessee.

Officials soliciting charitable contributions from those doing business before them is unethical conduct too many ethics codes allow, often expressly. Miami-Dade County has in its ethics code what appears at first to be a very reasonable exception to the definition of a gift:

§2-11.1(2)(2)(g) Gifts solicited by Commissioners on behalf of any nonprofit organization for use solely by that organization where neither the Commissioner nor his or her staff receives any compensation as a...

In the hands of politicians, government ethics can be wielded as a double-edged sword, as can be seen in recent events in Mandeville (LA), a city of 12,000 just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans.

Local governments accepting gifts from those who do business with them — contractors, developers, and the like — can cause some serious problems, even when they have to be approved by neutral bodies. This can be seen by what has happened in Middletown, CT, a small city not far from where I live.

Ethics charges are often not the end, but rather the beginning of a process to improve government ethics. Take a recent instance in Los Angeles.

After all the problems San Diego pension boards have had with conflicts of interest (see my blog post from November 2009), one would think they would be extra-sensitive to further conflicts. But, alas, not in this case.