Archive
The state of California this week launched its own YouTube channel. It brings together videos from several different state agencies -- including, as this San ...
With Earth Day looming over my quick-trigger guilty conscience again, the Boston Herald raises an old debate that has never been satisfactorily settled in my ...
Speaking of maps, here's a really interesting one I found on Paleo-Future.com, a cool blog about now-dated visions of the future. The map is ...
If you're a regular reader of the 13th Floor, you probably have an affinity for states and localities. And there's probably a good chance you ...
Last fall, when I was working on a feature about how states are rethinking their approach to higher education, naturally I turned to Kentucky, which ...
KY Supreme Court chief's surprise decision to quit. Lex Herald Leader
Drumbeat grows for impeachment of IL Gov. Blagojevich. Chicago Sun-Times
MN's "Hannah Montana ...
Atlanta bar owner Rufus Terrill has come up with a new way to discourage people from loitering around his Irish pub -- the Bum Bot.&...
So Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons and his wife are having some marital difficulties. Which is awful and sad and, frankly, kinda not any of ...
By now, anyone following the Democratic Presidential nomination has heard a great deal about so-called "green-collar" jobs. Barack Obama has promised five million ...
From the Newark Star-Ledger : Just over a year after he was nearly killed in a car crash, Gov. Jon Corzine notched a personal milestone yesterday ...
Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons may not be living in the Governor's Mansion, but he's still working hard to squeeze out revenue wherever he can. "...
Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons and his wife have filed for divorce.
I guess he'll be able to reclaim his status as a resident of the ...
I just got a press release announcing that Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, whom I wrote about in Governing's February issue, is leaving for private ...
Sunday's New York Times Magazine examines a "violence interruption" program in Chicago that is premised on an affirmative answer to this provocative question. ...
Bill Richardson hits the Kentucky Derby but leaves his Lt. Gov. out of the loop. AP
New St. Louis arena suffers different kind of "...
Pennsylvania state Sen. Vincent Fumo has introduced a bill that would make divorce illegal in his state: "There's no greater threat to families and ...
Maybe Rudy will have more luck with an election in Kiev? WSJ
LA Mayor Villaraigosa to answer Rush Limbuagh's "shoeshine guy" comment. Mixed ...
The NY Times review of Roger Lowenstein's book, While America Aged , makes it look worth reading for people in government. It's about pensions and although ...
A student at the University of Alaksa Fairbanks has created a "massive Lego replica" of a new campus building. Here, he shows Alaska ...
Slate has posted this great video of some of the "stupidest" bicycle lanes in America. Earning the top prize? A 20-foot stretch of ...
It's getting pretty hard to remain an optimist about the mortgage/foreclosure mess.
This week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke displayed a set of maps (cycle ...
Philadelphia got plenty of attention when former Mayor John F. Street launched his city's ambitious efforts to provide low-cost wireless Internet access to its citizens. ...
Cities contemplating increasing the number of surveillance cameras may want to consider London's recent experience as a cautionary tale -- the city's huge camera system ...
War and Peace.
Horton Hears a Who.
And a fishing rod.
You can borrow them all from the public libraries in Coventry, Lincoln and Scituate, ...
Ohio's Attorney General Marc Dan was accused of inter-office relations with his scheduler and mismanagement of sexual harassment violations by his team, Anthony Gutierrez, general ...
Police in the town of Pine Lawn, Missouri, are getting a new vehicle: Pine Lawn aldermen voted 5-0 Monday night to support Chief Rickey Collins' ...
The New York Times special "T Magazine" issue on summer travel came out this Sunday, and it includes a feature on the Artists ...
Seattle has just launched a new initiative to get drivers off the roads in the interests of meeting Mayor Greg Nickels pledge of making the ...
In recent years, securing adequate staffing for emergency services has become increasingly challenging -- some would even argue it's approaching a national crisis.
More news today from Seattle: Remember that Denny's that had been declared a historic landmark, preventing the owner, the Benaroya Companies, from tearing down ...
Smart cars are here (even if they're not exactly setting the world on fire). So maybe they're not as fuel-efficient as people expect, and maybe ...
Like most states, Rhode Island is in a budget crunch. One partial solution, proposed by legislators last week, is a cap on art for public ...
It's time for Governing's Managing Technology conference, so we're trading the unseasonably cool and rainy D.C. for the seasonably cool and rainy environs of ...
First it was Massachusetts and its stat on emergency room use: E.R. visits declined when the state's universal health insurance initiative fell into place. ...
Doctors are flocking to Texas. The reason--or the explanation that's become the perceived wisdom--is caps on malpractice awards. Since 2003, when the state legislature imposed a ...
So we just finished a special pre-conference session on city 311 systems, and some of the panelists cited a common problem: You set up this great 311 system, and then what happens? Other departments and jurisdictions want to horn in on your success without paying their fair share or doing the work!
from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle
Making Web sites and other electronic interfaces easier to use needs to be more than an aesthetic afterthought. ...
After an extremely interesting pre-conference session on city 311 systems, Governing's Managing Technology conference officially kicked off this evening with an address from Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire.
One of the mantras you keep hearing at this conference is how managing technology isn't really about about good technology, it's about good management. Or, as our publisher Peter Harkness likes to say, when it comes to IT, the focus used to be mostly on the "T." Now it's mostly on the "I."
There were few shocks in the Commonwealth Fund's first-ever state-by-state "scorecard" on children's health systems. Based on 13 criteria, the overall leaders were Vermont ...
from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle
Bill Gregoricus, a senior consultant in Tennessee's Office of State Planning and Policy, had an interesting--and somewhat disheartening--explanation ...
from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle
When I worked at the Big Belly Deli, I had a philosophy when someone called in a carry-out ...
from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle: At the final conference session on Friday, public sector leaders talked about how Web 2.0 is already changing government, bringing drastic changes in the coming years.
The city of Houston has had a ban on beards and goatees for its cops since 1993. Now, though, four officers are suing the city to ...
Yesteday, I attended a briefing at the National Press Club here in beautiful downtown Washington, D.C.
The subject: Would the health care plans put ...
from Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle
"Fusion centers" have developed over the past few years as places for local, state and federal ...
from Midway Airport in Chicago after Governing's Managing Technology Conference in Seattle
"It's not often that we're this busy at 8:30 in the evening."
...
You can rest easy: Eliot Spitzer has found a day job. He's apparently working in his father's real estate empire. By all accounts, Eliot Spitzer ...
Cities fighting to be the greenest in the land should look to Victoria, British Columbia, for some tips. In April, we wrote about cities hiring hiring sustainability or energy directors to encourage departments to turn off lights and shut computers when they're not in use.
It has come to this: People griping that thieves are stealing leftover French fry grease from the back of San Francisco restaurants. Turns out, there's ...
You can find anything on Google Maps (okay, not anything ). But you might not be able to find the town of North Oaks, Minnesota. The ...
A visit to the cafe at Portland's famous Powell's Books last week gave me a chance to log on to MetroFi's free wireless Internet service. ...
James Q. Wilson, perhaps the nation's most influential criminologist (though he'd hate that label...), is guest blogging on Vololkh conspiracy this week.
Here's a wonderfully ...
State mental health care can be bad enough as it is. You don't need your state's mental health commission filing a report that, well, belongs ...
from the Government Finance Officers Association meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
Last year there were fireworks: At its annual conference, GFOA leaders threw down the ...
Inrix just released a national traffic scorecard, including a list of the 100 most congested metro areas. The great thing about the report is that it ...
South Carolinians will soon have the option to express their Christian faith via that most sacred of religious media: a vanity license plate: South Carolina's ...
The LA Times has an interesting interactive map about the record-breaking number of marriages that have happened since same-sex unions were legalized on Monday night. ...
OMG! What if your license plate had a swear word on it (or at least the slang-y approximation of one)?
It's an issue in ...
Thanks to a couple of Virginia state legislators, residents of the Old Dominion state can once again enjoy a fanstatical summer treat -- frozen beer ...
So the Vermont Agency of Agriculture wants you to help name the state's new dairy mascot: a Holstein cow wearing overalls.
Which is fine, of ...
Florida Governor Charlie Crist is not a details guy. No matter how big the issue, he leaves it up to others in the legislature or ...
By now you've probably heard about the disturbing security video from New York's Kings County hospital. It shows a patient -- who's already been waiting ...
I just googled Louisville and was surprised by the result.
The first hit? Louisville.com, an entertainment Web site.
Number two? The University of Louisville.
...
The Pentagon is heading for Birmingham! Okay, not the Pentagon. But the Alabama city might be getting a shiny new five-sided building all its ...
Outside magazine just came out with its 2008 list of the "Best Towns" to live in.
(Side Note: I've been fortunate enough to ...
Washington, D.C. is well on its way toward implementing the nation's first large-scale bike-sharing program (although the launch has been delayed a bit).
Looks ...
I have a big idea for Starbucks. OK, it's at least a "tall" idea: a drink-to-own policy. Instead of the frequent-drinker cards offered ...
Whether you agree with city-enforced smoking bans or not, you can probably at least see the arguments for them -- people shouldn't be subjected to ...
You know Flint, Michigan? The place so decimated by job losses that it's sort of become synonymous with Rust Belt poverty?
Well, fear not! ...
When's the last time you've gone phishing at the office? New York State did an exercise in 2005, sending a fake email to 10,000 state employees in five agencies. The "scam" perpetrated by security officials, was a spot check on employee e-mail behavior.
Plenty of city's have inspired songs or stories or, more recently, blogs. But where's the romance? Where's the epic poetry?
Apparently, Detroit.
In "The ...
Delaware's home page has a word cloud. Also known as a category cloud or a tag cloud. You know, one of those lists of words, ...
Here at Governing, we get random promotional stuff sent to the office all the time. (If you need a copy of a new book about ...
Here's an exciting idea from the Commonwealth Fund: Add a longterm care benefit to Medicare. It wouldn't be a freebie. It would be financed by ...
Remember the heady days of 2005, when we thought that people could own homes without having any money and we thought that every block could support a Starbucks?
It's not enough that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked smokers out of restaurants and onto the curb. He wants them to kick the ...
Cities battling theft of copper wire? Old news.
The big story now is about disappearing manhole covers. Take Philadelphia, as reported in the New York ...
This question is for the women out there:
How much do you weigh? Really? What does your driver's license say you weigh? Are the numbers ...
Go to a symposium where the speakers are health economists
and you're going to get a lot of equations, bar charts and yield curves. And
...
For unending local drama, it's hard to beat Clayton County, Georgia.
It seems like half the headline-grabbing crimes in the region occur there. Its school ...
Does a new prison boost the local economy? The Nacogdoches, TX, Daily Sentinel investigates...
(Hat-tip to Crime and Justice News .)
The Tampa Tribune has an article looking at various issues on which presidential candidate John McCain has, in effect, punted, citing states' rights. These include ...
Yesterday, the Alaska legislature approved a $100,000 investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin's motivations in firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.
Palin has drawn criticism due to ...
Maybe I'm not reading these numbers right, but the YTD change in Texas' state revenues by major tax type (second table) shows Franchise Tax down 68.5% ...
The central question I tried to address in my recent feature in Governing ["The Corruption Puzzle," July 2008] is whether prosecutors step across a ...
Not quite sure how the topic of "last meals" came up, but the NY Post recently asked NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg about what ...
Texting-while-walking could become a crime in Illinois: Several officials, including the Illinois secretary of state, have voiced approval for a bill that would outlaw the ...
For the third year a row, Mississippi has been ranked the fattest state in the nation, with 32.6 % of that state's population coming in overweight or ...
When major drugstores and retailers -- Wal-Mart and the like -- began setting up retail health clinics, the word went out to states and localities: ...
Spoiler Alert! Don't read ahead if you're one of the 13 people in North America who have not yet seen The Dark Knight. So there's a scene toward the end of the new Batman movie (I think it's at about the 4-hour mark) that totally had me geeking out, GOVERNING-style.
Washington, DC, has become the first major U.S. city to launch a bike-sharing program. Residents who sign up for a SmartBike DC membership -- ...
The knock on Massachusetts' universal health reform package is that it does nothing to address the root cause of unaffordable health insurance: the high ...
Why should physicians pay out of their pockets to set up electronic health records so that insurance companies can profit?
That's something many docs are ...
A new report from MessageLabs, a spam-filter provider, lists the states that received the most spam emails in the first six months of 2008.
Here's ...
First, Los Angeles area hospitals were caught dumping destitute patients in Skid Row. Now, they're allegedly filling beds (and bilking Medicare) by recruiting patients from ...
A few days ago, I blogged about the link between education and health, and the ideas propounded by James Heckman of the University of Chicago ...
So you're filming a movie about a post-apocalyptic future, and you need to find a location that can stand in for a bleak, post-disaster wasteland. ...
The public works department in Clemson, S.C., is saving 350 gallons of diesel each month by using GPS systems in garbage trucks, according to USA ...
The next governor of New Jersey could come from the checkout line at the local supermarket -- at least on the TV. From Variety : Lifetime ...
One of the most common points of speculation coming out of escalating gas prices has been that people won't want to pay $100 to fill their tank and drive from distant suburbs to their jobs every day.
New York City is right in the middle of its Summer Streets program (there's a video above) -- in which the city is closing main ...
U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave a speech Tuesday saying that people wrongfully passed over for Justice Department jobs due to the politicized hiring ...
Ric Cantrell, chief deputy of the Utah state Senate, offered his take last month during a panel I moderated at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual meeting in New Orleans.
Details has a roundup and a slideshow of some of the tastiest street food in the nation -- everything from tamales to "sparerib tips ...
New York State has laid claim to an economic development tool like no other. A supercomputer housed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute upstate. Available to ...
Hope you're not interested in visiting Atlantic City to drive along the street known as Miss America Way: Atlantic City has decided to change the ...
No one thought it would be cheap. The question was, would it be effective?
And now the latest report from Massachusetts on its universal health ...
Ever wondered what your town's identity might look like based on color? (No, not skin color. We've got Census data for that.)
What ...
Fairfax County is experiencing what amounts to a crime wave for this generally affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. But is it an actual ...
Clairvoyants of St. Johnsbury, Vermont: Rejoice! You can once again practice your sooth-saying gifts without fear of recrimination: Soothsaying might still be banned in some ...
What do the following have in common: a peach straight from the orchard, a fresh tomato salad with basil and mozzarella, raw cauliflower with a ...
Sure, state and local governments are slashing spending, announcing hiring freezes and imposing travel bans. But the dire state of municipal budgets didn't really hit ...
Who says attorneys general aren't cool?
Or phat or dope or awesome, or whatever the current word for cool is?
The office of Anne Milgram, ...
It is more than likely that you've never heard of Calvin Beale, a rural demographer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who died of colon cancer on Monday, at the age of 85. He was a quiet, courtly bureaucrat in a city where those qualities tend to go unremarked.
The centerpiece of Seattle's now complete "Libraries for All" initiative is the downtown Central Branch co-designed by Rem Koolhaas, one of the creators ...
"Planned obsolescence" is a term coined decades ago but one I haven't heard much lately. I'm reminded of it by a recent Wall ...
That dark fizzy drink -- what do you call it? Soda? Pop? Cola? Coke?
It all depends on where you're from. Check out this ...
Carl Malamud of Sebastopol, California, is a lawbreaker, a miscreant, a reprobate. Get this. He downloads and photocopies state laws and regulations! Yes, you heard ...
Laudatory praise of the logistics seems to reflect consensus opinion about the Democratic National Convention in Denver. To find out how the city pulled it off, GOVERNING spoke with Guillermo Vidal, Denver's deputy mayor and director of public works.
In case anyone needed a Medicaid reality check, there was this from Barbara Edwards, the former head of Medicaid for Ohio: States that plan to ...
I'm usually a fan of hard line approaches and creative incentives. But Edmonds (WA) School District went a little overboard, even for me, and it's ...
You often see rankings that compare cities in terms of their average commute times. But here's a chart that puts the whole thing into better ...
Governing Contributing Editor Anne Jordan is in Oklahoma for a conference. She sent in this dispatch from the road: Last evening, sitting in a ...
As an American circa 2008, I've been known to eat in a restaurant from time to time. And there's probably nothing that irks me more than ...
Now that we've all figured out our carbon footprints, it's time for a new guilt-inducing eco-buzz question: What's your "water footprint"?
Your water ...
In January, Governing ran a story on how governments should be managing e-mail. That feature included this bit of information: ...elected leaders are devising ways ...
If certain advocates have their way, Ithaca, N.Y., could someday be home to a "pod car" system. Based on this New York ...
Everyone's been asking how the Wall Street mess affects Main Street.
Well, there's one clue in how it is starting to affect states. In this ...
States were already facing big revenue hits before Wall Street started to melt down. The fall of AIG might portend regulatory effects on states as ...
As Congress debates whether or not to pass a $700 billion bailout proposal, one of the issues that has arisen is how to include a rescue ...
Some imaginative government offices across the country -- from the L.A. Fire Department
to the U.S. Senate -- are experimenting with ways ...
Carey Torrice is a commissioner for Macomb County, Michigan.
Carey Torrice is also, according to her official bio, an actress.
And a private investigator (!).
And ...
Like Congress fleeing a bailout, we're getting the heck out of D.C.
We'll be attending Governing's Managing Performance conference in Austin, Texas.
We'll be ...
The 2008 Managing Performance conference kicked off in Austin this evening with a welcome from Texas Comptroller Susan Combs. She gave the conferees her take on ...
The leaders of the "Big 7" state and local government groups released a statement calling on the next president to pay more attention to states and localities in drafting policy.
In a session at Managing Performance this afternoon, Jill Jordan, the assistant city manager of Dallas, offered a reason for her city's interest in 311 that ...
We just heard from a panel of Minneapolis public officials, including Mayor R.T. Rybak, about that city's incredibly well orchestrated response to last summer's ...
As I mentioned earlier, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak spoke this morning at Governing's Managing Performance conference in Austin. He had a lot of very ...
Being at a state and local government convention in the midst of a huge federal election season is kind of funny. For one thing, as ...
The theme of this year's Managing Performance conference is "Performance Under Pressure." There's probably no city government more equipped to talk about that topic right now than Minneapolis.
I mentioned LAPD chief Bill Bratton's successes at reducing crime in New York City in the 1990s and Los Angeles today. His success in New ...
Could DMVs be in the process of becoming models of customer service? Don't laugh -- states such as Virginia and Indiana have already turned departments ...
Here in Austin for the Managing Performance conference, LAPD chief Bill Bratton made some amazing points about his efforts to apply a data-driven mindset to ...
Hey, you! How did you get to your desk this morning? Your own two feet? Well, congratulations! You just participated in the ...
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley's "intensely statistics-based approach to governance" was the subject of the latest article in Jonathan Walters's ongoing Citizens and Performance ...
What if someone told you that you could pocket more than $10,000 a year by making one change in behavior?
That's quite a tidy sum. Well, ...
Drumroll, please. Each year, we at Governing profile our Public Officials of the Year in the November issue of the magazine. We're announcing this year's ...
Looking for more tips to offer residents on how to conserve energy?
Take a look at these 50 simple tips from the Chicago Tribune. They came ...
Fareed Zakaria sees a silver lining in our economic woes. Individuals, the feds, and, yes, state and local governments, will suddenly have to show some ...
