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Philadelphia, New York and Washington, D.C., are using bus-mounted cameras with AI technology to better enforce parking violations, hoping to clear transit lanes of vehicles and make public transit faster and safer.
It’s happening in red and blue states alike: Policymakers and civil servants are increasingly relying on evidence to transform how taxpayer dollars are spent.
Investing in poor neighborhoods or dispersing the poor citywide each have their proponents. But place-based strategies — improving neighborhoods — may be our only feasible option.
In 2021, the state’s surplus was $3.7 billion and a year later it had grown by nearly another $3 billion. Now with $16 billion reserved, it’s likely that increased spending will occur in next year’s session.
More than 12,000 state residents who applied or attempted to recertify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, are still awaiting for their benefits to be processed months later.
Election offices in California, Georgia, Nevada, Oregon and Washington received powder-filled letters around the November election. But states and workers are increasing efforts to protect democratic elections amid continued risk.
Richmond, Va., Mayor Levar Stoney, regarding why he has decided to run for Virginia governor in 2025. Stoney announced his campaign in a video released on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (Associated Press — Dec. 4, 2023)
Planting trees along small streams is a simple idea with big consequences for watersheds.
Is your law enforcement agency accredited? Probably not, but it ought to be.
Mary Otts-Rubenstein, who has her own child with disabilities, is helping migrant families with medically complex children enroll in Chicago’s Public Schools. But it doesn’t get easier once the kids are enrolled because the system is overwhelmed.
Just a few years ago, the California city was winning acclaim as a national model for gun violence prevention. Last year, a regional trauma center treated 502 gunshot victims, compared to just 283 in 2019.
The state has dropped more than 130,000 of its 500,000 Medicaid beneficiaries since April and about 30 percent of those disenrolled were left uninsured, which could be a bad sign for the rest of the nation.
The state executed four people this year, while Texas, Florida, Oklahoma and Alabama executed a total of 20 others. Forty states have abolished the death penalty, paused executions or have not executed anyone in the past 10 years.
Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute (AAI), regarding the fact that, for decades, anti-Arab violence was omitted from hate crime data. According to the AAI, the FBI quietly removed the category from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program in 1992 and it remained missing until it was reintroduced in the 2015 report. While several states continued to track anti-Arab hate crimes separately from other groups, when that data was submitted to the federal database the numbers were added to the catchall category “anti-other ethnicity/national origin” bias incidents. (NPR — Dec. 1, 2023)
The National League of Cities has created a task force to make presidential candidates aware of local concerns — and to forge relationships with officials who'll move from the campaign into the next administration.
Future in Context
A recap of 2023's pivotal trends in gov tech: transportation transitions, cybersecurity challenges and strides in digital inclusivity.
The City Council voted unanimously to equip about 810 sworn police officers with body cameras next year, making a summertime pilot program permanent. However only 297 of the patrol officers will be required to wear them routinely.
A quarter mile of the road on 14th Street in the city’s downtown area will have the capability to charge electric vehicles that are equipped for such technology. The development will cost $1.9 million.
An audit of the county’s new system found lax oversight of raises and more than $3 million in overpayments to employees, which could take decades to fully reimburse.
Traumatic injury is the top killer of children and adults under the age of 45, claiming a life approximately every three-and-a-half minutes. Five states in the West have no Level I trauma centers; three other states have just one or two.
Kurt Hoffman, a Sarasota County, Fla., sheriff, regarding the police’s limited abilities to stop crime from happening due to their high visibility. Records show that since the beginning of 2021, there have been 33 cases in which a concealed handgun permit holder stopped what appeared to be a mass murder in the making. (The Hill — Nov. 30, 2023)
While moderate and liberal candidates did well in recent school board elections nationwide, experts say it's too soon to call these results a permanent change to extreme partisanship in school board politics.
Several teachers have raised questions about the effectiveness of the strike. The longtime chair of the Portland Association of Teachers’ bargaining team resigned amid the fallout.
Data shows that about 285,000 women live in contraceptive deserts across the state, areas where contraceptive services don’t meet the needs of the public. The state also has one of the highest rates of pregnancies that are unwanted or wanted later.
The city’s Board of Supervisors voted to terminate the Homelessness and Behavioral Health Select Committee on Tuesday after deeming it had been an experiment that had “run its course.”
When Arkansas expanded Medicaid in 2014, it used expansion dollars to buy private insurance for uninsured residents, making thousands more eligible for coverage. Georgia is considering a similar idea as a way to roll back hospital regulations.
On Monday, Nov. 27, the governor’s office conceded that it lacked the votes to push ahead its “Clean Cars” regulations. Now the governor must find another way to achieve his goal of phasing out new gas-powered cars by 2035.
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