States and Municipal Ethics

Last month, the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a bill requiring every local governing body (including school boards) to create an ethics panel to hear complaints regarding at least members of the local governing body and, in counties, elected constitutional officers.

The word is out:  if local government officials don't want to file financial disclosure statements, all they have to do is resign en masse and whoever wrote the ethics code will not only rewrite it, but will say all sorts of warm, wonderful things about them.

Individuals and companies doing the work of government or work approved by government, even when they do not have a direct financial relationship with government, should be within the jurisdiction of a government's ethics code. This controversial position is strengthened by what happened to many Tennessee local governments, according to a front-page article in today's New York Times.

State or local ethics laws, state or local ethics training, state or local disclosure forms, state or local ethics enforcement? This is probably the biggest issue in local government ethics. And it's a very complicated one, which I have only rarely dealt with. There are good (and bad) arguments on both sides, as well as practical, political, constitutional, and funding considerations to take into account.

I raise this matter not to deal with all its aspects, but due to reading...

Recently, the Jackson County (MO) county legislature decided to exclude not only county legislature members from its new ethics code, but also county attorneys. This exception is hidden square in the middle of a 58-page code:

There are two interesting developments going on in Texas right now, and two bills that will be heard in committee today.

One involves a request to the state legislature by El Paso County to allow local governments to give their ethics commissions teeth (they now can only censure).