States and Municipal Ethics

In a blog post yesterday, I noted that North Carolina was soon to require local governments to pass ethics codes. I've now found out more about the proposed law, and it is disappointing, to say the least.

Last week, I wrote about municipal corruption scandals in Montreal. This week, I'm happy to be able to write about a report requested by the province of Quebec, which determined that the province's municipalities should all have a code of ethics (only about 10% do now), that the largest cities and the counties should have ethics commissioners, and that financial disclosure and ethics training should be required. Contractors...

In her comment to my blog post on a Michigan recusal matter, Catherine Mullhaupt of the Michigan Townships Association not only pointed out the effect of a women's property rights act on local government conflict of interest law (see my blog post on this), but also pointed out...

Over the last two days, a new-fangled local government ethics controversy has taken Ohio by storm:  allowing counties to sell advertising on their websites. A law to that effect has been inserted in the pending state budget bill, according to an Associated Press article.

Rarely does someone make a comment to one of my blog posts that brings such a fresh look at a standard conflict of interest issue as the one made recently by Catherine Mullhaupt, Esq., Director of Member Information Services at the Michigan Townships Association.

It is important to recognize that the interest in having government officials both make and be seen to make decisions in the public interest rather than in...

The word from Jackson County (MO) last week was that the county legislature was "close to revising the county’s ethics code to include them under its rules," according to an article in the Kansas City Star, as discussed, very skeptically, in a recent blog entry....