How Are You Involved?

The Rice Lake City Council has taken a step that I find interesting and I’m going to follow the process for a while. The new resolution requires an agenda item called “Conflict of Interest disclosure and protocol” or something similar. They added this after a problem with a contracted engineer not disclosing a conflict.
The resolution requires staff, contractors and developers to provide information on any conflicts or potential conflicts of interest that may occur during any agenda item at the meeting and the procedure they will use to resolve the conflict. I assume that the Council’s ethics code would provide direction on clear conflicts of interest, but potential conflicts raise another question. Will requiring the discussion at the beginning of the meeting raise the level of attention to ethics problems and encourage the participants to take the high road and recuse themselves from participating in the decision-making process?
The first item I would add to this process is to include the Council members, committee members and board members. Rarely do these participants think about their conflicts before the meeting and as the meeting discussions develop, they are less likely to remove themselves even when they finally realize they may have a potential conflict.
This has the potential to establish a culture of ethics at the top of the organization. Frank conversations about what may create a conflict and the resulting actions may generate an organization that minimizes ethical lapses.