Misuse of Office/Special

An editorial in yesterday's Star Press of east central Indiana calls for passage of a state law to prevent municipal employees from sitting on a body that oversees their department or agency's budget. The focus is primarily on preventing city and county workers from sitting on city and county councils.

The editorial calls it a "no-brainer" because "it's a conflict of interest to have public...

The recent arrest of the Prince George's County (MD) executive and his wife, who is a new member of the county council, shows how wrong it is to give the county executive and individual council members power over development projects, a topic I've written about with respect to Dallas and...

According to an article yesterday on seacoastonline.com, a committee of the Select Board of North Hampton, NH (pop. 4,500) brought to the Select Board its concern about the town administrator dealing with health insurance issues when he was on the board of the...

If "conflict of interest" were a cause of action, what would it be? A matter right in the small city next to my town answers this question, and gives a new angle by which to view conflicts.

What can local government ethics professionals learn from what has come out in the recent indictments of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his father, the city's director of water and sewerage, Kilpatrick's CAO and CIO, and a city contractor?

Things have changed. It used to be that the first thing you did when you found out the local ethics commission was investigating you was hire a lawyer (which is itself a change from the days when you found out you were being investigated by the D.A. and handed him a bribe).

In this era of the image and the consultant, the truly with-it (if that term is still in use) government official turns to the image consultant. And that is what Baltimore's...