Misuse of Office/Special

A big controversy surrounding the race for mayor of Honolulu is focused on the state's pay-to-play culture of the past, and what pay to play actually is. The reason for this is that a former Hawaii governor is running for mayor, and he is being supported by Bob Watada, a former state Campaign Spending Commission executive director who is known for bringing the state's pay-to-play culture to its knees during his 1994-2005 term in office.

According to...

Luis Toro, director of Colorado Watch, wrote an interesting Huffington Post post yesterday about ethics issues relating to Colorado's public trustee system.

Public trustees (one per county) oversee the foreclosure system in the state. They work things out between lenders and homeowners. Most of them are elected county treasurers, and ten of them are appointed by the...

A Complex School Board Conflict Situation
Should someone closely associated with an organization that has been awarded a sizeable preschool contract be prevented from sitting on a school board when the contract was not with the school board? That is one of the questions raised by an article this week in the Connecticut Post. The Bridgeport, CT school...

If you read the newspapers and blogs, the big issues in the Chicago Chick-fil-A controversy are free speech and government boycotts. But it's really a government ethics issue.

All rational voices acknowledge that a local legislator should not block a store opening just because it has given large sums to help an unpopular political cause. What they aren't saying is that a local legislator shouldn't be able to block a store opening in his district at all. Zoning matters should not be...

One of the things that really ticks citizens off is when a local official uses his position to try to get out of a traffic ticket. The financial benefit may be minor, but there are two things that are major. One is that this conduct suggests that favoritism is common in the government. That is, the expectation and provision of special treatment is an indication of institutional corruption.

The second thing that can be major is the benefit when the charge is not just speeding or...

Gift Bans
In Sunday's Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, former state representative Roger Hines wrote a column with the title "What Does Corruptibility Have to Do with a Dollar Figure?" Hines considered the state's $100 limit on gifts from lobbyists. After talking about the value of lobbyists...