Local Government Attorneys

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.

You can learn something from every local government ethics code there is, and especially from codes that have only been proposed. Today I'm going to look at a proposed ethics code for Glen Ellyn, IL, a western suburb of Chicago (pop. 27,000). The proposed code and resolution are attached; see below.

One Moore County (NC) commissioner has been faced with two conflict of interest matters in 2010, one of which led him to recently resign from a board. Although the two have nothing to do with each other, they have become politically intertwined which, along with the lack of an ethics program, has prevented the responsible handling of the conflicts.

It is difficult to emphasize too much that council control over the ethics process is not only inappropriate and ineffective, but harmful. The first use of a new ethics ordinance in the aptly named Battle Ground, Washington (pop. 18,000) provides yet another example of the problems that may arise.

Is discomfort with a centralized ethics program by various parts of a local government something that should stand in the way of creating one? According to an article in the New Haven Register last week, this has been suggested in a discussion by the board of selectmen of Madison, CT, a town...

A Failure to Respond to an Ethics Complaint
It's always interesting to see how many ways there are not to deal with ethics complaints. When you think you've seen them all, a new one comes out of nowhere.

In this case, nowhere is Taylor, Michigan, a city of 65,000 outside Detroit. According to an article in the News-Herald on Saturday...