Two days ago, <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/726&quot; target="”_blank”">I wrote</a>
about a Chicago Heights (IL) situation where two council members who
work under a third council member were in a position to vote for their
boss to be the city's mayor. A suit brought by a group of local

I listened yesterday to the testimony of Kevin Powers, a member of the Nevada
Legislative Counsel's office, to the House Committee considering the

The Nevada legislature is really going out of its way to make sure that
its members, and no one else in the state, is protected by legislative
immunity with respect to the state ethics commission. For a body that
was afraid, without a court's blessing, to exclude its members from the
state ethics commission's jurisdiction (to the extent a member is
involved in legislative activity), it does not seem afraid, even before
the appellate opinion in its legislative immunity case has been

Recently, the Connecticut Task Force on Municipal Ethics discussed <a href="http://www.cga.ct.gov/gae/METF/DRAFT%202008%20Muni%20Ethics%20Task%20Fo…; target="”_blank”">a
draft report</a>. Neither in the report, nor in <a href="http://www.cga.ct.gov/gae/METF/doc/022009TASKFORCE.pdf&quot; target="”_blank”">the

Electing local government employees to local government office can
cause problems. There are constitutional protections against forbidding
it, but there are conflict of interest arguments against doing it.<br>
<br>
According to <a href="http://www.southtownstar.com/news/1549021,042909chmayor.article&quot; target="”_blank”">an

Watch this very cool www.transparency.org video on corruption:<br><br>

How often should ethics commissions meet?<br>
<br>
The usual answer to that question is, As often as they need to. But how
often is that?<br>
<br>

Most of the <a href="http://reformillinoisnow.org/press%20releases/IRC%20100-Day%20Report%20…; target="”_blank”">Illinois
Reform Commission's report</a>, which was published yesterday, has
little to do with local government ethics, but there is enough overlap
to make it worth skimming through. The IRC was charged with recommending changes in the state's ethics and campaign finance programs.<br>
<br>

Throughout the Internet, there is interest in what is most
popular, what is most viewed and linked to. So below is a list of the top 20 of my blog
posts from 2008 and 2009 in terms of having had the most hits.<br>
<br>
Later, I'll do the top 20 from the earlier years, which have had more
time to accumulate hits.<br>
<br>

Local government officials often defend halfway ethics reforms by
saying that they're just the beginning, and that something is better
than nothing. But halfway reforms are often effectively little more
than nothing, especially in the area of enforcement. "Window dressing"
is one term for such reforms. "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_tiger&quot; target="”_blank”">Paper tiger</a>" is
another.<br>
<br>