John O'Leary

Recent Articles

• A Little Nudge Will Do
• Dec 10, 2009
• When government wants to discourage something, the instinct is to criminalize that behavior. But small infractions often get lost by prosecutors and courts that have...

• Pick It or Ticket
• Dec 9, 2009
• Wilmington had a problem. Sanitation-related complaints were flooding its Division of Licenses & Inspections (L&I), as neighborhoods were being dragged down by trash left outside...

• Driving Change: Go Big or Go Home
• Dec 2, 2009
• Forget incremental improvement, create a team focused solely on change.
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• Driving Change: Go Big or Go Home
• Dec 2, 2009
• A city official once compared managing in City Hall to driving a bus, with one difference. "Every seat is equipped with a brake, so lots...

• Finding Deadbeats
• Dec 1, 2009
• The problem of child support enforcement is a big one. This column highlights Virginia, which found a creative idea that uses a relatively low-tech approach...

• Last Call for Deadbeats
• Nov 30, 2009
• Locating parents who are negligent on their child support payments just got a little easier with an innovative approach used by Virginia's Division of Child...

• Murky Transparency
• Nov 24, 2009
• The movement toward open government is well underway, with the Obama administration leading the charge. The effort is praiseworthy, but the implementation is proving dicey....

• Ending the Misery in Michigan
• Nov 15, 2009
• Michigan is home to the nation's highest unemployment, and faces a gaping $2.8 billion budget hole. Northwood University's Keith Pretty and Timothy Nash offer five policy...

• Democracy on the Cheap
• Nov 4, 2009
• What if they held an election and nobody came? That pretty much happened in New York City in September. According to the New York Times, "...

• Fixing Public Pensions
• Nov 1, 2009
• Public employee pensions can be huge budget busters, as a previous article explored. In today's column, Bill Eggers explores ways to dig out from the...

• Email in the News
• Oct 28, 2009
• In LA, the city has just signed a contract with Google to handle email for 30,000 city employees, a $7.25 million deal that is the largest of...

• Finding the Clarity
• Oct 27, 2009
• If the data is buried in a computer, it doesn't do much good. Only when data is "mined" can actionable information emerge. In their article,...

• Outsourcing Agnosticism
• Oct 21, 2009
• The best public administration occurs when the public sector takes direction from political leaders, but doesn't allow politics to stand in the way of performance....

• Minnesota Misery
• Oct 19, 2009
• Like many states, the North Star State is facing tough times. The state's Department of Management and Budget says spending has been reduced in real...