Ethics Reform

You know you're doing a pretty poor job with government ethics when a grand jury recommends that you be all but abolished. This is the case with the Broward County School Board, according to a report published on Frday. It concludes, on p. 48:

Unfortunately based on the history of this Board as an institution, we have no confIdence in their ability to...

Usually, in government ethics situations, local officials can get away with doing nothing, especially when the conflict isn't theirs. Few ethics codes have provisions prohibiting complicity in and requiring the reporting of others' ethics violations (see the City Ethics Model Code's provision for a provision that covers both).

That's why I found it refreshing to come across an...

Last month, I did a blog post on the huge exceptions to Alabama's new gift provisions (pp. 24-26). What I didn't note was the similarities, and the gulf, between the bribery provision in Alabama's constitution and the gift provisions in the old and new statutes, and how this has...

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 this second of three blog posts on ethics reform in Gwinnett County, Georgia, I will look at recommendations for ethics reform made by a grand jury in its October 2010 report, and by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia in...

The boom years of the Oughts were very good to Gwinnett County, a suburban Atlanta county of 800,000 that grew by a third in the last decade. But boom times are rarely good for local government ethics, and Gwinnett County appears to be no exception. A grand jury report unsealed in October (a searchable copy is attached; see below) found a series of land acquisitions by the county at above market price (even after the...