Ethics Commissions/Administration

I don't write about Jacksonville much, because my colleague at City Ethics, Carla Miller, is the city's ethics officer. She has been working hard to ensure that the city's ethics commission is given more authority and independence, and that the city's ethics laws are improved. This week, the council will be moving closer to approving, or undermining, reforms.

Instead of giving my opinion of what she is seeking, which is basically the same as hers, I will share the recent,...

The dream of every ethics commission is to have a guaranteed budget. But it is not really a dream for two reasons. One, there are ethics commissions with guaranteed budgets. And two, it is a reasonable policy that can be countered only by a local legislative body's need for control. This blog post will look at the arguments for and against a guaranteed budget, as well as several examples of and approaches to guaranteeing budgets for ethics commissions and similar independent bodies and agencies...

It's important for ethics commissions to be prepared for the occasional official who, along with his or her attorney, will do anything to stop or at least delay its investigation, including attacks on the EC itself. A good example of how relentless an official can be is John J. O'Connor, now former head of the SUNY Research Foundation, whom I wrote about in a recent blog post.

It's hard to know where to start with a situation in Crescent City, CA, a town of 7,500 in northern California that has already been the subject of a City Ethics blog post.

One of the most striking things about the situation is that it is the first time I have seen an anti-SLAPP-suit defense used successfully against someone who appears to have been found guilty of an ethics violation in order to stop her criticism...

Electing EC Members
Is electing an ethics commission a good idea? I had never heard of an elected EC until this week, when I read that the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, an Indian nation in Kansas, canceled an EC election for four out of six seats, because there were no candidates.

Electing an EC would seem to be the most independent way to select its members, but the problem is that, since...

Waiving the Privilege and The Extent of Withdrawal
According to an article in yesterday's Business Journal Daily, the Ohio Ethics Commission, which has jurisdiction over local government ethics, is investigating the Western Reserve Port Authority's lease of property at the local airport near Youngstown. Two controversies have arisen from this investigation...