States and Municipal Ethics

All ethics oversight cannot be done by an ethics commission. Much oversight needs to be done outside of the complaint process. Even when complaints are made, a lack of proper oversight can leave a big hole in the facts available to an EC. I came across such a situation in yesterday's Bristol (VA) News.

According to an article in the Vancouver Sun, the mayor of Vancouver, BC is concerned about the conflict between his chairing the city's police board and his role in approving the police budget. He said, "It's difficult for me to advocate directly to the mayor on behalf of the police board because I am the mayor."

Update: October 15, 2010 (see below)

Decision-makers are given too much credit. Most individuals who vote on government matters are non-professionals who are paid little or nothing, and who rarely focus on the matters before their body. They are, therefore, very dependent on staff members who are professionally trained and who are paid to focus on the matters before the body.

And yet, according to...

Gifts from restricted sources, that is, from those doing business with the local government (and their lobbyists), are exceptionally damaging, in that they make the public believe their officials can be bought or that their officials are running a pay-to-play government. It's too bad that at least some members of the Los Angeles ethics commission don't recognize this.

Here's a good followup to yesterday's blog post about a conflict of interest in Tucson. In that post, I argued that annual financial disclosure makes it clear that an official's basic interests are public information, and said, "The goal of annual disclosure is to let the public know about an official's basic interests, so that if the official does participate in a...

There is no greater pleasure for some people than accusing ethics professionals and ethics commission members of unethical behavior. That is why ethics professionals and ethics commission members have to be extra careful about what they do, and why individuals who have not dealt responsibly with conflicts of interest, at least in the recent past, should not accept a nomination to an ethics commission.

What no one wants to read is what is being written about the current chair of the...