Public Works Ethics and Conflicts

Avoid the professional embarrassment and financial loss associated with breach of ethical obligations regarding a public project.

Public sector infrastructure work involves high levels of responsibility with satisfaction and profit, and can offer advancement from successful projects that meet the needs of people and nature. However, the work also involves ethical and legal dilemmas that can cause loss of jobs, business, money, reputations, and licenses to practice. It can involve lawsuits, investigations, official inquiries, and in extreme cases, indictments, trials, and convictions based on civil or criminal law. Most public works practitioners do not experience such situations, but avoiding them requires knowledge, experience, and judgment. The maze of ethical and legal norms and rules arising in public works projects can be confusing, but practitioners can be equipped with basic knowledge through a framework of situations, rules, and guidelines that will enable them to avoid mistakes and provide guidance to other stakeholders in the arena of public works projects. These involve a hierarchy of things you must do to achieve compliance with those that you should do in areas of choice based on codes of ethics and situations where practitioners have discretion. Situations range from project planning through regulation and include activities of players like designers, contractors, public agency employees, vendors, and public officials responsible for governance. Dilemmas include lack of competencies leading to design mistakes, incompetence in constructed projects, bid rigging, favoritism in contracting, negligence and incompetence leading to public health and environmental emergencies, inattention to environmental and social justice, supervisory mistakes, violation of public trust, substandard materials by vendors, careless financial accountability, and improper competition for business.

Faculty

Neil S. Grigg

Colorado State University