local government

On June 19th Douglas Newby’s opinion piece titled, “Democracy Needs to Replace City Manager Ward System” was published with the assertion that the council-manager form of government (under which the City of Dallas, Texas is currently formed), is undemocratic.  read more »

A confluence of potent forces is creating an era of localism and decentralization across the planet making local decision-making and action more important than ever before. This is particularly true in the economic realm, where cities and regions must take full advantage of their unique combination of resources, culture, infrastructure, core competencies in industry and agriculture and the skills of entrepreneurs and workers.     read more »

For years, some provincial governments in Canada have been either forcing municipal amalgamations or offering incentives for municipalities to merge. This has included municipalities from the largest (Toronto), which was forced into a merger over voter disapproval in 1998 in an advisory election to rural municipalities with fewer than 1,000 in Manitoba, forced to merge by the recently defeated provincial government.  read more »

The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data Smart Governance

by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford

Technology, and especially the use of data and analytics, has been transforming the way cities manage service delivery. Former Indianapolis mayor New York City deputy mayor Steve Goldsmith, and his colleague at Harvard Susan Crawford, recently wrote a book called “The Responsive City” looking at this technology revolution.  read more »

When Rahm Emanuel was Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, little did he know he’d be helping craft a law that would help him as the future Mayor of Chicago. Many American cities failed to put away enough money for current and former government workers.  Rahm Emanuel and powerful Democratic Party interest groups would like the federal government to bailout their pensioners.  read more »

An article in The Wall Street Journal discussed attempts to merge local governments in Michigan. While efforts such as these gain wide support because of the belief that they will save money, there evidence shows the opposite.  read more »

Once again, in the debate over California’s Proposition 29, the tobacco companies seem to have all the money in the world, even though relatively few people smoke nowadays. Under the circumstances, I don’t shed much of a tear for them.  read more »

It has been a tough year and a half in Christchurch. Christchurch is the largest urban area South Island and second in size in New Zealand only to Auckland. On September 4, 2010, Christchurch was hit by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, stronger than the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that with its aftershocks killed 300,000 people in Haiti in 2010. To the great fortune of Christchurch, there were no fatalities from the September quake.  read more »

Is there any connection between the fact that Salinas has the gang problem that it does, and the fact that Monterey County's restrictions on the building of housing are very strict?  read more »

The Martin Prosperity Institute recently released the map below, which compares the GDP of several US metropolitan areas to the size of national economies. For instance, the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan statistical area (MSA) has a GDP of $311.3 billion dollars. If it were a country, it would be the 40th biggest national economy on earth, ahead of countries such as Denmark ($310.1) and Greece ($303.4).  read more »