Ethics Commissions/Administration

At last week's COGEL conference, I learned about a judicial case involving the Anne Arundel County (MD) Ethics Commission, which has been going on for six years. A decision of the Court of Special Appeals last November is worth a look. There's a lot of interesting material for local government ethics professionals. Two of the issues the case raises are the difference between legal ethics and government ethics,...

Here are three cases from New York City that involve relations between superiors and subordinates, one of the most important aspects of local government ethics. What is especially interesting is that two of these cases involve co-opting, in one case of subordinates, in the other of vendors. These cases were included in COGEL's ethics update last week.

Update: December 14, 2010 (see below):

One thing I learned at the COGEL conference last week is that Darleen Druyun, the infamous Air Force procurement officer who favored Boeing before taking a job with it, had been given ethics advice on six occasions and ignored it.

In trying to find something online that said this (I did not), I came across an excellent 2004 Project on Government...

Yet another court decision discussed at the COGEL conference placed First Amendment free speech rights far above the obligations of a government official, employing a strict scrutiny approach where a simple due process (for statutory vagueness) approach would have been sufficient. This time the official is a member of the Sparks (NV) city council, in fact, the same council member who successfully sued to overturn an advisory opinion of the state ethics commission in a case I carefully reviewed...

"You say that [we are] corrupt and I'll jump over this table and punch you out." Those are the words of Philadelphia city commissioner Margaret Tartaglione, according to an article in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer. She was upset by a journalist's questions regarding the handling of elections in Philadelphia.

What got the...

A Municipal Bid Rigging Scheme Comes to Light
According to an article in the New York Times this week, Banc of America Securities (which recently merged with Merrill Lynch) agreed to pay the SEC and others $137 million to settle charges related to a municipal bond bid-rigging scheme. For those who think competitive bidding rules are enough, this case should make you think otherwise.