Governing: State and local government news and analysis
The 2023 legislation establishing the grant program also includes new equipment for rural sheriffs.
In 47 states, schools have a higher proportion of students from elsewhere than they did 20 years ago.
Special elections offer some clues about the mood of the electorate. Recalls might be an even better predictor.
Professional sports teams are on the move and they’re leaning on state and local officials to help them. Subsidies exceeding $1 billion per deal are on the table.
Given the state’s budget deficit, legislative leaders are calling for reviews of how existing programs are working. But more than 70 percent of the 1,118 agency reports due in the past year have not been submitted yet.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis hasn’t just used Georgia’s RICO law to prosecute Donald Trump. Schoolteachers and rappers have also been charged, and the state has used the law to go after protesters. Shouldn’t these tools be reserved for the kinds of prosecutions they were intended for?
Bomb threats, misinformation, AI advancements and ransomware are just some of the challenges election officials will deal with this year.
Louisiana is one of the nation's leading oil and gas producers. The state is now getting seriously into wind as well.
Returning predators to wild places is a good starting point for dealing with our biodiversity crisis. Colorado can be a model for what states can do to repair their ecosystems.
Downtowns were all the rage for most of this century. There’s still a market for density, but many people want it to be carefully managed.
Project delays and slow bureaucratic processes are costly for constituents, businesses and governments themselves. What’s needed is a culture of urgency.
Legislatures across the nation are confronting several social issues including crime, drug use, immigration and poverty. These issues will continue to hold resonance, of course, in the November elections.
A conservative coalition is hoping to make private school choice universally available in half the states by the end of 2025.
Charleston exemplifies an infill strategy that produces attractive new houses and greater density, but comes up short on affordability.
A plant in Michigan might become the first to reopen after closing.
Thousands of county officials came to Washington, D.C., to make the case with Congress that funding counties directly is the best way to improve lives across the country’s diverse rural and urban communities.
Is our criminal justice system so infallible that it should green-light actions as irrevocable as taking another person’s life? Hardly. Very few people of means go to death row.
Headlines obscure the reality that many cities welcome immigrants for the economic and social benefits they bring. The tools of architecture offer ways to assess the resources needed to accommodate and integrate these populations.
The Georgists advocated shifting the tax burden from buildings to land. Today that would face major political hurdles, but there might be variations on the concept that could spur housing development and discourage land speculators.
“Housing-first” programs are expensive and ineffective. “Treatment-first” approaches are more successful at improving the well-being of homeless people by reducing drug use and increasing employment stability.
Data from over 15 million consumers in 588 counties across the nation reveal that poorer communities waited an average of 170 minutes more for power to be restored, though sometimes it took much longer.
A new bridge over the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge has been talked about for years. Louisiana is moving ahead with the project, which could cost around $3 billion.
There are some delightful, lively small towns, but let the numbers do the talking: In Illinois, downstaters and their city “cousins” live in different worlds of expectations and aspirations.
The arguments over border sovereignty have never died away in more than two centuries of American life. Now they are coming to the forefront again.
So far this year in Michigan, Democrats have done practically nothing. Also, let's not call it the Texas GOP Civil War and the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that 10 Republican senators are not eligible to run this year.
Even with the lessons from 2020, election administrators find themselves in unknown territory this time around.
The moniker may have been popularized in the last few years, but the concept has its roots in the 19th century, going back to the redevelopment of Paris, and in the “garden city” theory of the 1890s and early 1900s.
State budgets are on track for modest growth even as federal fiscal recovery funds wane, pension underfunding persists and AI promises (or threatens) to change everything.
The Biden administration wants to help remove all lead service lines in the U.S. within the next decade. A new report from the Center for American Progress highlights progress in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
