Transparency

Did you know that the District of Columbia has its own Speech or Debate Clause? I learned this from reading the Motion for a Protective Order on Behalf of Mayor Vincent C. Gray filed on Thursday in the case of Payne v. District of Columbia. Gray, a former council president, is seeking to be protected from testifying in a case involving alleged retaliation against a whistleblower. A...

Election time can be a good time for local government ethics. Good government candidates spout all sorts of interesting ideas about ethics independence, budgeting, transparency, and the like, which are rarely heard between elections.

Take, for example, Leland Yee, who is running for mayor of San Francisco. His Plan for an Independent City Hall starts off with a call for the...

This is the second of two posts looking at Kathryn Schulz's excellent book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (2010), as it applies to local government ethics. This post focuses on how to deal...

Sometimes, conflicts are built right into ethics laws, partly because it is in the political interest of those with conflicts, and partly because they don't even view those laws as ethics laws.

A good example of this is the Connecticut law (CGS §9-623) that places enforcement of municipal campaign finance laws in the hands of city and town clerks. In Connecticut, clerks are often elected...

Last week, I wrote about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision invalidating a Montgomery County's ethics code to the extent it applied to the employees of independent agencies, such as the district attorney's office.

According to...

It staggers the imagination how combative local government officials can sometimes be with respect to ethics commissions. A year ago, I wrote about a former Sioux Falls (SD) council member, Kermit Staggers, who attacked complaints filed by the city's ethics board as "frivolous" and attacked its procedures when it gave him two private, that is confidential,...