County Related

Annual reports are, among other things, one of the most important, and overlooked, enforcement mechanisms. At the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL) conference last week in Chicago, the executive director of the Philadelphia Board of Ethics, Shane Creamer, presented the board's first campaign finance...

Back in June, in the middle of a long blog entry on legislative immunity, I referred to the virtuous circle that includes both ethics laws and the Speech or Debate Clause, which provides legislators immunity from interference from the executive and judicial branches. I would like to focus on this virtuous circle, and explain it further, because I think it might be the most important argument in support of continued independent...

Last week, the Kansas City, MO city council ordered an investigation into possibly unethical conduct by the city's mayor, according to an article in the Kansas City Star. The principal conduct is the use of the mayor's former communications director to work on a political campaign (not the mayor's re-election campaign)...

I just obtained the Rhode Island Ethics Commission's memorandum in support of its jurisdiction over legislators, which was contested by the former state senate president William V. Irons, as discussed in an earlier blog entry. The argument of the EC's brief is not typical, because the ethics commission and code were created pursuant to a 1986...

Sports and other event tickets are a constant issue in local government ethics. Yes, mayors are often expected to attend major events, but who else is? Why should city ownership of a facility matter in handing out tickets? The ownership is not the officials' or employees', but the citizens'.

According to an article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, the California Fair...

I was in Chicago for the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws annual conference for a week, which is why I haven't been blogging lately. I was there when Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested, so the arrest and the tales of selling a Senate seat and blackmailing the Chicago Tribune are old news now. But there are a couple of interesting facts about the situation which have been largely ignored.