Don't do anything, she tells them, that you would be ashamed to see on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper.
We public employees are being watched, she says, much closer than employees in private businesses. She tells about a complaint to her when a county truck pulled up to a full-serve lane at a gas station where self serve was available. She was able to respond that full serve was justified - but said thanks for the monitoring.
The mayor shares my bias that ethics codes don't do a lot of good. "Writing it down doesn't make people ethical," she says. But it may lead to more bureaucracy than is good for us, a lot of hair-splitting on interpretations, long legal hassles and high legal fees and fighting over technicalities rather than ethics.
So how do we keep government ethical? Electing more people like Mayor Lingle is one way, but there may not be enough of them electable. The alternative - even with her - is to keep things as open as possible. We all are at our best when we know someone is watching. That's one reason small communities often work better than big communities.
I, for one, would be willing to jettison our entire public law on purchasing and its convoluted requirements for bids and buying. I'd substitute a simple law requiring quick public posting of what will be and has been done.
Our present law means it can take months and more than a dozen signatures to buy something private business could buy in a day with one or two signatures.
This increases government employment but doesn't improve results. In the open, wrong-doing can be spotted, publicized and punished better than today's red tape can prevent it.
This concept never will be adopted, unfortunately, unless the public can be educated to buy into it. Meanwhile politicians will continue to take refuge in meeting every publicized act of wrongdoing with new laws and procedures that usually do more harm than good.
Look at the Honolulu campaign ethics ordinance passed in 1994 after the FBI trapped a cabinet member trying to exchange a nonbid contract for contributions to Mayor Frank Fasi.
It has gone through some seven different legal interpretations, may very well be unconstitutional and unenforceable but can be pointed to as a "we did something" response by the City Council and Mayor Harris.
Many years of "we did something" responses like that are the reason our law books are so thick and government is so hog-tied. By law we make government far less efficient than private business.
LINGLE'S test of being willing to have the public know just about everything you do offers another great improvement over living by written-down codes. You can do something that might not be strictly by the book and still pass public scrutiny - taking shortcuts, for example, in an emergency.
That may dismay those driven to live by the book in government just for self-protection - but most of the public will understand and accept. If you don't think the public will understand, then don't do it.
The areas the public needs to watch are the money- and power-dispensing centers. These are necessary and not necessarily bad centers.
Around them openness can be very helpful: notably both bid and nonbid contracts, investments by the rich employees' retirement system, where government deposits its money, plus the many important law-making and rule-making decisions of the state and counties. On campaign contributions, openness may be better than evadeable limits.
A feeling that people are watching will do more than a lot of ethics codes to serve the public interest.