Archive
Creating a culture of openness and candor is critical to organizational success. It takes a strong, concerted effort by leaders.
There's a lot that creative public leaders can borrow from the world of agriculture.
Meanwhile, the latest Labor Department data shows states and the federal government have shed workers.
A roundup of money (and other) news governments can use.
California legislators proposed a bill to confiscate guns from people who pose a threat to themselves or others. Other states are already considering following suit.
Some cities think the key to getting citizens to trust in and see the value of government again is developing civic technology that's proven to work.
View and compare bridge inspection data by state.
All the public-sector management news you need to know.
State map shows how much states will need to cut carbon emissions.
The Environmental Protection Agency used a formula that considers where states are now and where they could be by 2030, leading to wide variation in emissions targets.
State legislatures have seen dozens of bills related to election reform so far in 2014. And unlike recent years, most of them are trying to make it easier to vote.
Gov. Jerry Brown is working hard to break the state's cycle of boom and bust. The voters seem to like his ideas.
This week's roundup of money (and other) news that governments can use.
A few states want to make experimental drugs available to terminally ill people without the FDA's approval -- an idea popularized by the movie "Dallas Buyers Club." Critics say the laws could be harmful to public health.
Women in Utah aren’t as politically engaged as their peers in other states. Current and former elected officials want to change that.
The president’s public retirement savings account only goes so far, so about a dozen states are looking for alternative ways to help their many constituents who have no nest egg.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel insisted Wednesday that he’s trying to prevent “straw purchases” — not intimidate licensed gun owners — by requiring the owners of Chicago gun stores to videotape every weapons sale.
The IRS will start penalizing employers for sending their employees to the health exchange -- a cost-saving move that a few big cities and counties have done to their retirees.
Flexibility, public engagement and predictability help attract outside money for infrastructure, experts say.
Eleven states are extending a provision of the federal health law to avoid punishing former foster kids for pursuing jobs or schools in other states.
Digital technology has given us tools that make a methodical approach to institutional learning more useful and powerful than ever.
A surprising number of this year's rising stars are seeking higher office.
The food we don't eat gives us gas. But beyond renewable energy generation, organic waste holds the potential of big benefits for our communities.
A roundup of money (and other) news that governments can use.
Los Angeles and San Francisco are jumping into variable-rate parking in a big way.
View updated population estimates for more than 700 U.S. cities.
Policymakers are looking to attract immigrants in an effort to offset some regions' population declines.
The past decade has seen a resurgence of these boosterish bucks. But do they actually redirect spending to mom-and-pop shops instead of big box stores and online retailers?
Gov. Mark Dayton pushed lawmakers this year to focus on getting rid of useless and outdated laws during the state’s short legislative session.
After the Silicon Valley city that Facebook calls home slashed its police services, Facebook put funding down for a new police officer.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is expanding its reach beyond the states to local governments.
Since 2005, students at Auburn University have been building homes designed for just about anyone to afford.
A new study suggests dental therapists would boost dentists’ profits and help more Medicaid patients get care. So why are dentists so opposed to states’ efforts to license them?
The old approach to how humans interact with nature is getting new life in an effort to make cities more sustainable.
Increased partisanship in state and local government has caused the organizations representing them to lose some of their influence on federal policy. Can they get it back?
Is the Ohio governor a conservative or an ideologue -- and will it even matter in November?
In hopes of reducing the city's high crime rate, Camden, N.J., made a controversial and unprecedented move a year ago to replace its police force.
Painkillers prescribed by both well-intentioned doctors and so-called "criminals in white coats" are driving the overdose epidemic. States and cities are pioneering ways to control it.
After much pushback from unions, big cities like Detroit and Chicago are now making their retired employees get health care on the exchanges or through spouses.
All the public-sector management news you need to know.
A new survey shows most governments are experiencing more retirements and also hiring more.
Elected officials have a tendency to promise big savings and painless cuts that often don’t turn out how they hoped.
Which incumbent governors face a tough road ahead and which are expected to win re-election easily?
After suffering deep cuts during the recession, public health officials are rethinking how to fund these essential services.
Before streetcars practically disappeared, they carried millions of people around our cities. Will light rail systems decline too?
Should government facilitate Americans’ changing relationship with cars?
After losing hundreds of millions of dollars, the city is starting to clamp down on IT contractors to make sure taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.
By letting citizens live in vulnerable places even after disaster strikes, governments plant the seeds for future disasters.
Nearly every state has faced lawsuits over school funding. But only in Kansas have judges tried to quantify the quality of education.
Chicago's treasurer recently launched an initiative to make financial literacy a regular piece of the curriculum for grade schoolers.
Two others, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton and Senate Minority Leader John McKinney of Fairfield, qualified for the August primary.
Maryland and Massachusetts, two states with a history of health-care innovation, are seeking approval to spend more money to fix their exchanges before the next enrollment period. Will the feds approve?
Rather than just building more and bigger pipes, Columbus is taking a greener, more holistic approach.
Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia added jobs in April as the national economy had one of its strongest months in years.
It's the latest state to raise the minimum wage and the first this year that already linked automatic increases to inflation.
A roundup of money (and other) news governments can use.
Results of a new nationwide survey show Millennials’ attitudes on a range of issues. Read key takeaways from the report.
The former head of consumer affairs in New York City explains why helping the poor manage money wisely would also help governments manage their money better.
Although issuance is down, there have been a few good developments on the municipal bond front.
New Jersey is fighting over relatively small civil-service reforms. That shouldn't be surprising, given who's proposing them.
Even when improving the lives of others, the people running departments of children and families can’t escape controversy.
The story of Italy's effort to decentralize its governmental functions offers lessons for innovators everywhere.
We need to re-engineer the front-end review and approval process to get these projects done — and reap their benefits — much more quickly.
Five states have used data from the federal food stamps program to quickly enroll more than 500,000 people in Medicaid.
If the feds allow two of the biggest cable companies to combine, municipalities would lose even more power to create high-quality, low-cost publicly owned broadband services for their citizens.
View police and law enforcement employee statistics for more than 1,000 U.S. cities.
Police staffing levels vary greatly across U.S. cities, averaging about 17 officers per 10,000 residents. View and compare employment data for each jurisdiction.
A recent Urban Institute analysis shows how many years new state workers will need to put in before earning pension benefits from their employers.
All the public-sector management news you need to know.
Seattle recently became the first city to limit the number of rideshare cars. City Councilwoman Sally Clark talks about the controversial regulations that have since been suspended.
Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases have pushed some states to try to make it tougher for parents to exempt their kids from immunization requirements. It's proving to be a hard sell in some states.
These days, most elections are won or lost long before Election Day in primaries in which tiny numbers of people vote. It's plunging our political system further into dysfunction.
A measure on the city's November ballot may not be a perfect way to fix its retirement system, but doing nothing is not an option.
According to the latest Labor Department data, local governments are continuing to add jobs while state government payrolls remain flat.
As states and localities burn through federal fire-fighting funds faster than predicted, they worry the federal government will once again cut fire prevention programs to make up the difference.
Review state graduation rates for public high schools, broken down by race and ethnicity.
Maps shows real per capita personal incomes for metro areas.
To sustain excellence over time, governments need to build leadership at all levels of their organizations.
With increasing partisan polarization, there's little reason for a Democratic or Republican governor to head to the middle, putting governors with bipartisan appeal at risk of becoming extinct.
At the same time states are looking to beef up corporate tax collections, they are also cutting corporate taxes.
Senate races can have coattails for gubernatorial contests, but the impact is far from guaranteed.
A decision by state lawmakers to let prospective teachers slide on a basic skills test is a bad idea.
A recent audit says Oregon, which mirrors national trends in some ways, hasn't done enough to get citizens off public assistance and into the workforce.
When students from abroad attend American universities, their ideas enrich us.
There’s a lot America can learn from these two countries about how to avert municipal bankruptcies.
Britain has a bold yet simple plan to do something few U.S. governments do: test the effectiveness of multiple policies before rolling them out. But are American lawmakers willing to listen to facts more than money or politics?
While the two regions’ poverty problems are difficult to compare, both places have ignored the needs of their struggling populations -- until now.
Cities aspiring to prominence on the global stage are overlooking a key economic development strategy.
The United States may be a leader in the search for a cure, but it lags behind other countries when it comes to diagnosing and caring for people with dementia.
The Spanish city is embedded with more than 12,000 sensors to help the government operate as efficiently as possible. It’s changing the way Europe thinks about cities.
How the small Middle Eastern country jumped from 49th to 28th in online service delivery should have state and local CIOs in the United States paying close attention.
Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian’s ideas are the basis for what may be America’s next consumer privacy law. But her ideas have fierce critics.
It's something more than 30 U.S. states and cities have tried and failed to do.
In 2009, Brazil became one of only three countries to mandate early education. But it quickly found that universal preschool is a simple idea that’s difficult to implement.
As urban populations have grown, cities have become centers of innovation.
The Eastern European city found a way to offer free rides to citizens for a small cost to government. The U.S. has tried it before. Will cities try it again?
After a dramatic increase in earthquakes that puts it behind only three other states in seismic activity, the Sooner State is worried about its bridges.
Getting the public behind you is critical, but it isn't easy. Nobody did it better than Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Should everyone have a guaranteed minimum income even if they don’t have a job? It’s a radical idea on the Swiss ballot that also has some support in the United States.
While still recovering from genocide, Rwanda implemented a national ban on plastic bags -- a feat that only one U.S. state has accomplished.
A recent book outlines other countries’ approaches to gun control that have significantly reduced violence. Should states look to these places as a model for gun laws?
Like the U.S., China will have to change how local officials think about public finance if it wants to stop its growing debt problems.
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was intentionally built straddling the border between Quebec and Vermont.
Nearly all Americans support organ donation, but only a third are registered donors. A study in the United Kingdom offers insight into what gets people to give up a part of themselves.
Thanks to desalination plants, Israel is no longer worried about its water supply. So why aren't there more desalination plants in the United States?
A Dutch journalist attempted to capture the essence of civil servants through portraits of local government office workers worldwide.
A resource recovery rate of 100 percent may be a worthwhile goal, but there are plenty of challenges facing governments that want to achieve it.
In several states, public employees anticipated pay raises this year. But in some states, all they're left with is disappointment.
Competing with the likes of Facebook and Google is tough, but it’s more crucial than ever.
All the public-sector management news you need to know.
The city's new urban agriculture initiative aims to revitalize distressed neighborhoods with new economic activity.
The current Congress has imposed few of these costly requirements. But it may be premature for state, local and tribal governments to stop worrying.
The state's new protections, which are the most comprehensive in the country, guard against surprise medical bills that are typically the result of patients seeing doctors out of their network during emergencies.
Not only is the agency becoming more efficient, but its culture is being changed.
View salary data by job type and industry for each U.S. metro area.
D.C.'s Tax Revision Commission has suggested an unusual way to broaden the city's tax base -- and get around the federal government.
Tennessee asked caseworkers this and more in what is believed to be the nation's first survey of state child protection workers.
The federal program that funds technology in schools spends about $600 million on outdated tools like pagers. The FCC wants to reform it, but how that happens is subject to political debate.
Some state and local retirement systems have found a formula for stability.
Keeping these lessons in mind can improve the chances of success for any public-sector initiative.
View migration data and components of population change for U.S. metro areas.
Even though many expected most states to choose to create their own insurance marketplaces and the deadline to secure federal funding to do so nears, most states are passing over the issue in legislative sessions.
All the public-sector management news you need to know.
The nation has been seeing a slowing in the rise of health-care costs. Whether the fiscal pressures on governments will ease remains to be seen.
The state has achieved remarkable results in a short time, particularly among African-Americans.
The Phoenix Police Pension Board voted 4-1 Wednesday to let stand three controversial policies that allow public-safety officers to "spike" their retirement benefits at an additional cost to taxpayers.
View changes in real per capita personal income for counties on our interactive map.
Partially driven by a devastating alternative, Congress appears closer than ever to passing an Internet sales tax bill.
A Baltimore program that requires participants to use their government rental aid in low-poverty, mostly white suburbs sheds light on how government can implement housing vouchers more effectively.
View local area minimum wages, adjusted for cost of living.
While minimum-wage workers feel the pinch everywhere, it’s far more difficult to make a living in the nation’s most expensive urban centers. View data and read an analysis for more than 300 cities.
With voter ID laws a bone of contention, more attention and money is flowing to state secretary of state contests.
The political novice spent more than a decade in state prison, convicted of crimes including manslaughter and assault with intent to commit rape.
They may not have a big impact on elections this November, but that could change down the road.
Our map shows general government gross debt as a percentage of GDP for all countries.
A new rule tries to keep muni market players from getting too friendly.
Failure to teach students even basic theory behind how computer technology works has several implications -- none of them positive. That’s the motivation behind a new push to boost computer learning in public schools.
Yes, it’s been a boon for government work, but it also opens the door to conflict and confusion.
There’s a whole new generation of heroin addicts in rural areas and smaller, struggling cities, which have few resources to fight the epidemic and its affects.
The United States lags behind other countries when it comes to sophisticated infrastructure in part because it lacks the workers to build or maintain it.
Conservatives were out in force last year trying to roll back requirements for some states to use alternative energy. They failed. Does that mean attitudes on green power are changing?
After 28 years in the Army, Tony Tata landed a job for which he lacks the traditional credentials. Is the ability to command more important than substantive knowledge when it comes to high-level government jobs?
Data shows concentrations of public employees for each state.
Boom times in oil and agriculture have brought new wealth to people in many rural counties. But the money in bank accounts isn't translating into more money for government.
Recent political battles have highlighted the decades-old divide between urban and rural areas, making groups that occupy a middle ground more necessary than ever.
Rural lawmakers are dwindling in number as people continue to migrate to metropolitan areas. But the battle between urban and rural politics is as big as ever -- and those out in the country may be winning.
Hospitals may be rural America’s single most important and most endangered institution. Between having to serve some of the sickest and most expensive populations and federal cuts, can small town America save more from closing?
