Ethics Reform

A new way to obtain ethics reform is making some headway in New York State. A number of former bigwigs, including former governor Mario Cuomo, and former NYC mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, have created an organization called New York Uprising and a three-part pledge, one of which calls for a new state ethics commission and financial disclosure requirements (...

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, the New York Governor’s Task Force on Public Authorities Reform has filed its report (not yet available online) on the implementation of the Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009, whose provisions are...

I've been writing a lot about the controversies surrounding a new Broward County (FL) ethics code, but there's also been controversy in the Broward County School District that is likely to lead to an ethics code of its own (according to a Miami Herald editorial on Saturday, a former school board member pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges this year, and another member revealed that her...

Gifts from restricted sources, that is, from those doing business with the local government (and their lobbyists), are exceptionally damaging, in that they make the public believe their officials can be bought or that their officials are running a pay-to-play government. It's too bad that at least some members of the Los Angeles ethics commission don't recognize this.

Update: August 9, 2010 (see below)

You've got to hand it to them:  Broward County (FL) commissioners don't give up. Some of them have fought and fought against the prospect of having a new ethics code, written by the county ethics commission. August 10 is the deadline by which they must either approve the new ethics code, or it will appear on the...