Misuse of Office/Special

Last month, I wrote about how the Green Bay ethics board hadn't met much more than the Packers had won Super Bowls. Well, now that the Packers have won another, it's time for the ethics board to meet again (the last time it met was in 1999).

One thing Green Bay and Pittsburgh officials have in common is their payment for face-value Super Bowl tickets. You may wonder what is...

The U.S. is not the only country with a revolving-door problem. In Japan, the problem is deeply institutionalized. It is as much a part of the retirement system as pensions.

But the Japanese name for the revolving door shows that not only does the system work in a different manner than ours, but that the Japanese have a different opinion of the relative value of government and business. The name is amakudari, which means "descent from heaven," the way Shinto gods used to...

According to an op-ed piece by a county commissioner from Collier County, Florida (in the Naples Daily News), two interesting twists on the gift to an official's favorite charity gambit occurred recently. Gifts to officials' favorite charities are a common way to get around pay-to-play laws. Here is what...

In my recent blog posts about Gwinnett County, especially the first, I spoke about how the problem of not following formal processes is a serious government ethics problem, but is often not covered by ethics codes. The Massachusetts Ethics Commission has recently entered into disposition agreements with a member of a town's three-member board of assessors and the...

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...

Sometimes a conflict situation makes you take a fresh look at common ethics provisions. This is true of a matter that has arisen in Poughkeepsie, New York (pronounced Pah-kip'-see), home of Vassar College, according to an article in Tuesday's Poughkeepsie Journal.

The provision in question is...