Misuse of Office/Special

One of the most damaging aspects of ethical misconduct in government is that it decreases the amount of citizen participation in government activities. People feel that their local government is rigged to help politicians and their families, friends, and business associates. It's not worth spending time getting involved in a rigged system, unless your goal is to be part of the in crowd.

It was nice to read...

A few days too late for St. Patrick's Day, today's Irish Examiner has a wonderful story about catching officials involved in ethical misconduct relating to land use. It's an old story, but new to me, and probably new to you, as well. The occasion of the article is the publication of a 3,...

I did stop and and try to invoke legislative immunity, but the camera would have none of it.

—State senator Steve King of Grand Junction, CO, a career police officer, said jokingly about a red-light-camera ticket he received in Denver. He voted against banning red-light cameras in Colorado's municipalities. From an article in the Denver Post yesterday.

Proximity rules are common to local and state government ethics codes nationwide (see my blog post on them from five years ago). They require officials to withdraw from any matter dealing with property within a certain distance of property they own or rent, no matter how many others have property within the same proximity.

According to...

On Saturday, I attended a one-day conference on Institutional Corruption sponsored by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (videos of it will eventually appear here). Although local government was scarcely mentioned (there was one image of a painting that portrayed the 1930s machine in Kansas City, MO), many ideas that were discussed are applicable to local government ethics.

I...

It's not every day that a neighboring town makes the front page of the New York Times. It's especially surprising when the reason is, at heart, a local government ethics problem.

The town is East Haven, CT (most recently in the national news for a part of it being overrun by waves during Hurricane Irene), and the problem ostensibly...