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Nine towns are suing New Jersey over a law implementing aspects of the state’s affordable housing requirements. The rules have pushed states to produce more multifamily and low-income housing.
The public likes what lawmakers around the country are doing, but the industry’s lobbyists are working hard to embed provisions into trade deals that would undermine much of the progress states have made.
Future in Context
The organization that popularized civic hackathons is now taking on the responsible use of AI in government. Code for America draws on the collective expertise of the public, tech and nonprofit sectors to tackle societal challenges.
Sonoma County officials hope the new policy will act as a guide for how to appropriately use AI technology for emails, reports, job descriptions, spreadsheet calculations and more. But the policy prohibits using confidential or specific county information.
The state’s Industrial Commission, made up of the governor, attorney general and agricultural commissioner, has approved a project to expand education about carbon dioxide capture and storage, which includes a newly debuted website.
In the past year, 83 percent of Georgia’s corporate recruitment has landed outside of the 10-county Atlanta area. A new program, Georgia Match, sent more than 132,000 letters to high school seniors to highlight technical college programs across the state.
Danny McCormick, a Republican state representative in Louisiana, on a bill enacted by the Legislature repealing a ban on the sale of raw milk. Driven by increasing demand for the product, a number of states have moved to remove bans despite public health officials' warnings that drinking unpasteurized milk could lead to a spike in potentially deadly bacterial and viral infections. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says that 143 deaths from various illnesses in the U.S. have been linked to raw milk since 1987. (Yahoo News — June 22, 2024)
The amount Texas would have had to shell out last year — more than half of the $144 billion lawmakers allocated for the state's current two-year budget — to cover the cost of...
Local governments have jurisdiction over the third-largest source of methane emissions: the decomposition of organic waste in municipal solid waste landfills.
An economist is making the case for such a correlation, and it carries a ring of plausibility.
Gov. Jeff Landry praised the state’s investment in coastal protection projects, such as levee infrastructure, as one reason why the Category 2 storm spared most of Louisiana from major destruction.
The bill states that Baltimore “shall be entitled to recover for economic loss” from the bridge collapse which stalled the city’s port activity, reallocated emergency services and impacted local workers. But some legal experts are skeptical.
State Reps. Jaime Greene and Nancy DeBoer say the plan will ensure students leave school ready for higher education and lifelong careers by reversing cuts to school safety and mental health resources and modernizing the state’s Merit Curriculum.
Behavioral scientist Jan-Willem van Prooijen on the findings of a study published in Science in which an AI "debunkbot" successfully got conspiracy-minded users to reconsider their beliefs. (Science — Sept. 12, 2024)
In much of the country, downtowns remain relatively empty. The implications for property values, mortgage debt and property tax collections have not yet fully played out, says a Columbia University economist.
We know what works to prevent tragedies like the recent one at a Georgia high school. Effective gun policies could save thousands of lives.
Other states look to Texas as the state psychology board pushes against the new national licensing requirements.
The City Council approved a three-year, $336,362 contract with a gunshot detection program, which alerts police when it picks up the sound of a potential gunshot. Gunshot detection systems have long sparked questions of accuracy, expense and efficacy.
Following the Montgomery County commissioners’ unanimous decision, election officials will now have to generate manual ballots for residents outside of Texas and retrofit the more than 1,000 machines with an older version of the software.
Rebecca Wood, a single mother, regarding the $2.49 “program fee” that charged each time she loaded money into her daughter’s school lunch account. Wood noted that the nearly $2.50 fee was the same price as the school lunch. As more and more schools turn to a cashless system, processing companies will charge as much as $3.25 or 4 to 5 percent per transaction, which often disproportionately impacts lower-income families. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that 87 percent of sampled districts contract with payment processors. (Associated Press — Sept. 11, 2024)
Rainfall patterns are changing. What can local leaders do to curb the growing risks?
Members of the state’s Election Board need to be referees, not cheerleaders, but Donald Trump has made clear he considers some of them on his team.
They face a unique long-term threat from global efforts to address climate change, strategies that will sharply reduce demand for fossil fuels. The best time to build a more resilient economy is before a crisis arrives.
Suburbs of the state’s small cities, like Harrisburg, are slightly moving away from the solidly red voting trends of previous years. Trump won Lower Allen, Pa., by 1,000 votes in 2016 but by only 129 in 2020.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, regarding the approximately 15,000 Haitian immigrants that have arrived in Springfield, a city of just about 59,000, since 2020. The governor will send law enforcement and $2.5 million in health-care resources to the city. (Associated Press — Sept. 10, 2024)
State revenue collections are returning to earth after several years of high budget surpluses. In many cases, they used the unexpected funds for one-time investments and to shore up reserve funds.
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