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One way to deal with possible conflicts is to nip them in the bud by not allowing any personal communications between officials and interested parties ("ex parte communications"). All communications must be official, either documentary or at formal meetings or negotiations.

What stronger personal interest is there than family relationships? And yet so many people don't get the problems nepotism in government poses, at least until it takes a chunk out of their wallets.

The Chicago Tribune editorial on Illinois' recently passed ethics bill is a must read. It outlines the process by which the ethics bill almost didn't become law, despite the fact that no legislator, at any time, voted against it, and those who delayed it insisted they were doing so only to improve it (but never, of course, did). Even numerous...

Update below:
Back in August, I wrote a long blog entry praising the way San Diego's Centre City Development Corp.'s  (CCDC) board handled a conflict matter. I focused on the board's refusal to pull the usual San Diego (and elsewhere) stunt of denying that anything serious had occurred. Instead, it looked into possible conflict problems with other projects, and it shelved the big project tainted by the too-late-...

Because local governments' annual ethics reports serve so many purposes -- publicizing the ethics program's existence, educating officials and the public about what an ethics program includes, and making an example of those who do not file disclosure forms or are found to have participated in unethical conduct -- they should be made as easily, widely, and inexpensively available as possible.

And that means putting them up on the local government's website.

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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...