Ethics Commissions/Administration

Last month, I wrote about how the Green Bay ethics board hadn't met much more than the Packers had won Super Bowls. Well, now that the Packers have won another, it's time for the ethics board to meet again (the last time it met was in 1999).

One thing Green Bay and Pittsburgh officials have in common is their payment for face-value Super Bowl tickets. You may wonder what is...

In my recent blog posts about Gwinnett County, especially the first, I spoke about how the problem of not following formal processes is a serious government ethics problem, but is often not covered by ethics codes. The Massachusetts Ethics Commission has recently entered into disposition agreements with a member of a town's three-member board of assessors and the...

This third of three posts on ethics reform in Gwinnett County, Georgia looks at the county officials' response to the recommendations in the 2007 report drafted by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia, and in...

In a Pay to Play Law Blog response to my recent blog post on a discussion that had appeared in the Pay to Play Law Blog, the argument is made that pay-to-play laws that go beyond disclosure, such as prohibiting campaign contributions from government contractors, set up a slippery slope toward the undermining of constitutional rights and toward higher compliance costs...

The most underrated aspect of accountability is the need for government officials to honestly and publicly explain why they do what they do. This need is strongest for two groups of officials:  elected representatives and their watchdogs.

It is, therefore, painful to see the chair of a major county board of ethics refusing to even speak to the press about his own possible conflict of interest. You can see it, too, in...

Last week, the Houston council passed a number of amendments to its ethics ordinance. They were billed as a big step forwards, but I do not agree. In this post, I will look at what people have been saying about the reforms and how the role of the ethics commission has changed. In the next post I will take a critical look at the new provisions.