According to <a href="http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070412/NEWS… article in today's Louisville <i>Courier-Journal</i></a>, there is a dispute in Jeffersonville, Kentucky that is worth taking a look at.

The mayor has accused the city board of ethics' attorney of having a conflict of interest and is urging that he be fired. The conflict involves support for the another mayoral candidate (in the primary).

<b>'It doesn't serve the people to have an ethics commission responsible to the body of government it reviews. It's counterintuitive.'</b>

'Anonymous comment to <a href="http://eyeonmiami.blogspot.com/2007/03/hallelujah-ethics-commission-wan… Eye on Miami blog entry</a> about the desire of the Miami-Dade County Ethics Commission to strengthen its powers and responsibilities

Having politicians on the Queensbury, NY Ethics Board has created a mess.

Who should be in charge of writing and revising municipal ethics codes?

An <b>excellent idea</b> for a grass-roots campaign to get some control of corrupt government employees in India.

<h2>Gandhi smiles on anti-bribe scheme</h2>
<b>Ashling O'Connor, Mumbai
<a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21529310-2703,00.htm… Times</i></a>
10 April 2007</b>

<i>Below is an op-ed piece I wrote this week for the North Haven </i>Post<i> about the unethical conduct involved in my town's budget process. Nothing was done illegally or in violation of the town's mediocre ethics code.

I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, <i>Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation</i> in the latest issue of the <i>New York Review of Books.</i> Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics.

This is an excellent article by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/th… Freidman</a> which really highlights something that I consider to be very important in the development of any sort of effective ethics program - namely <b>SIMPLICITY</b>. Often it is the really simple things combined with a bright idea that bring the greatest change for the better...

When an official makes <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/234">an Ad Hominem attack</a>, everyone realizes there is an attack. And when an official makes <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/244">an Ad Populum defense</a>, everyone realizes that there is a defense. But when an official sets up a Straw Man, the situation isn't so clear. It's not an attack or a defense, but a response to an argument.

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book <i>The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role</i> (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries.

Responsibility is the key to municipal ethics as well as administration. It is central to democratic accountability, to recognizing and dealing with sometimes conflicting obligations, to being a public servant.