According to <a href="http://www.thestarpress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008802050348&quot; target="”_blank”">an article in the Muncie (IN) <i>Star Press,</a></i> the Muncie City Council voted 5-4 not to adopt the American Society for Public Administration’s ethics code, something that hundreds of citizens at the meeting favored.

The new mayor of Indianapolis, Greg Ballard, who ran as a candidate who would bring ethics to city government, is already embroiled in a controversial ethics issue. He has appointed Robert T. Grand as chair of the Capital Improvement Board (CIB), which manages the city’s convention center and sports stadiums, including that of the Indiana Pacers, a basketball team owned by the Simon family. There is a good chance that the Pacers' lease will be renegotiated next year.

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Good, open government does more than give people reason to trust those who spend their tax dollars. It even gives people a better environment.

The Ethics Resource Center’s first National Government Ethics Survey has just come out, and is available free at the <a href="http://www.ethics.org/&quot; target="_blank">ERC’s website</a>, although it requires registration. It is the result of a random 2007 telephone poll of government employees, and is part of a series of polls looking at ethics in different sorts of workplaces. City Ethics' Founder, Carla Miller, was on the Advisory Group for this survey.

<i>Articles have been written putting into question the study on which the following blog entry was based.

The most important division in ethics is between ends-based approaches (consequentialist or teleological, best known as "the ends justify the means") and rules-based approaches (deontological).

The most important problem for individuals in government is that we are taught rules-based approaches while we’re growing up (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), but in government most talk is in terms of ends (Will it raise taxes?).

Transparency is often seen as a technical, often annoying part of municipal ethics. All those notices and agendas that have to be filed at the right time in the right place, all those document requests from the news media and opposition parties. Is all this really necessary for good government? Does it lower taxes, provide better services? Or is it just a pain in the neck?

Sometimes you need a big disaster – Enron, for example – for people to understand the cost of not acting ethically.

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<p>The <a href="http://www.ethics.org/&quot; target="_blank">Ethics Resource Center</a> in Washington DC has released an interesting document for anyone active in the <b>Ethics & Compliance Officer</b> field - see the quotes below which give a taste of the subject of the document:</p>
Note that they have removed the link to the paper. It may be elsewhere...

Has your city’s government grown up yet, ethically speaking?

This isn't as silly a question as it sounds. All of us develop morally, just as we develop physically and intellectually and emotionally. We just don’t see our height grow or get university degrees or get married and have children, ethically speaking.