<div class="timestamp">September 27, 2006</div>
<div class="kicker">Broken Bench</div>
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How a Reviled Court System Has Outlasted Critics
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<div class="byline">By <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_gl…; title="More Articles by William Glaberson">WILLIAM GLABERSON</a></div>

The <i>New York Times</i> has been running a series of articles about municipal pension funds (by Mary Williams Walsh, Michael Cooper, and Danny Hakim, August 20, 22, 27, September 1, 4, 2006). The articles focus on two principal problems: (1) pensions have been increased, largely in order to get short-term cuts in negotiations with unions, and (2) calculations to determine the health of pension plans usually have little relationship to reality. Each problem is essentially an ethical problem.

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<a href="http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_4192705">http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_4192…;

<b>Colton credit card had phone-sex charges</b>

COLTON State and local authorities are investigating hundreds of phone-sex calls and dozens of hotel bills charged to the city-issued cell phone and credit card of Councilman Ramon Hernandez.

A Classic commentary on the Judiciary - with a comic (if a little sad) <a href="http://magic-city-news.com/article_6471.shtml&quot; target="_blank">demonstration</a> from my own Australia to paint the picture (rather well I thought...)

Contracting is one of the municipal ethics issues that is most often overlooked as an ethics issue. One reason is that the laws governing competitive bidding are often at the state level. Another is that municipal competitive bidding laws often appear outside codes of ethics (often because they are state mandated). But municipal contracting should be at the center of ethics concerns, because it is a relatively secret area where a great deal of wrongdoing and harm can occur.

Reading the newspapers, you might not realize that behind all the fraud, non-disclosure, and "reckless mismanagement" that former S.E.C. Chair Arthur Levitt found in San Diego's pension and wastewater systems were serious conflicts of interest.

There are municipal ethics issues that will never find their way into any ethics code, but which should certainly be covered in ethics training courses. Many of these issues involve the relationship between government and businesses.

One of the most serious problems with municipal ethics codes is their unreadability. Few of those who write them seem to consider the capabilities of the code's audience: municipal officials and employees without a legal education.

This year Arizona will vote on a ballot initiative that will give one lucky voter in each election a $1 million prize. Is this an experiment that should be tried?