Governing: State and local government news and analysis
The city councilmember won the Democratic primary for mayor of Philadelphia on Tuesday. She’s also the heavy favorite to win the general election in November and to become Philadelphia’s first woman mayor.
It’s not easy to get a smaller city that’s been losing population growing again. Every town can’t be a high-tech hub. But an urban scholar has some ideas that might help some of them.
Misinformation thrived during the pandemic, exacerbating health inequities. To meet its core mission, the public health field needs to engage more actively, particularly in historically mistrustful communities.
They are increasing transit ridership numbers all along the stops on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. It’ll take more work to make them into regular riders.
Artificial intelligence has potential, but it can’t replace simple, reliable technology solutions and the human touch. And there’s a risk that it will automate existing inequities instead of alleviating them.
With ranked-choice voting, voters are more likely to choose city leaders who have broad support. And it’s a big step toward dialing down the divisiveness of our politics.
They have been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, with new challenges around public safety, homelessness and commercial real estate. A series of reports from the Brookings Institution explores the future of downtowns.
Allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses is about more than highway safety. It's good for assimilation, belonging and community engagement.
The public expects better from the highest court in the land and has lost trust in the judicial branch as much as the others. Our resident humanities scholar asks, who will save us from our guardians?
The state’s decade-old dropout prediction algorithms don’t work and may be negatively influencing how educators perceive students of color.
Congress has authorized billions, but there’s a problem: New infrastructure planning frequently relies on historical flood patterns for its benchmarks rather than forecasts of changing risks as the climate warms.
Simply rehashing the problem does more harm than good. Instead, state and local leaders must help citizens see how solutions to homelessness benefit all of us.
The platform has undergone several changes since Elon Musk bought it and took it private late last year — especially when it comes to credibility and verification features, critical to government communications.
Judges at the state and federal levels are becoming more nakedly partisan, ruling in ways that reflect not careful contemplation but the desire for particular policy outcomes.
The declaration that the COVID-19 public health emergency is over doesn’t mean the end of its impact, or of the virus itself. What comes now?
The pandemic forced local governments to activate their innovation skill sets. Now city leaders must grow that spirit of inventiveness beyond the tactical, building it into the day-to-day work of government.
A new report from RAND Corporation argues that progress against opioid drug abuse and addiction is best understood — and addressed — in the context of everything that comes with it through an ecosystem view.
Pro football represents a peculiar combination of high demand and low frequency that is a highly inefficient use of urban space. What cities need is housing.
A half-century ago, a Republican president moved to devolve power from Washington to states and local governments. Today it’s the right that’s trying to turn that around.
The Safe Streets and Roads for All program, which provides direct funding to cities to make street improvements, is accepting applications. Other grants for transportation infrastructure are open or opening soon as well.
State and local financiers now face interest rate markets that anticipate decelerating inflation and a weaker economy. Public treasurers and debt managers need fresh ideas, agility and prudent strategies.
Too often it’s our youth who are the targets of racial- and gender-based animus and attacks. Rather than making life harder for children, public officials should be protecting them.
By slashing budgets, dictating what can be taught and gutting tenure protections, lawmakers are putting their states' public universities on a glide path to uselessness.
Opponents of church-state separation have been emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the growing acceptance of Christian nationalism on the right.
America’s intervention in the Russo-Japanese War a century ago cast Theodore Roosevelt as an unlikely but ultimately successful diplomat. Teddy would be surprised to see who is leading the diplomatic offensive this time.
Colorado has a draft rule that would impose oversight and transparency requirements on insurance companies that use big data about consumers or feed such data into predictive models and algorithms.
New net metering rules have taken effect, giving solar owners a much worse deal than they had before on the excess power they sell back to the grid. The change could diminish the state's lead in small-scale solar electricity.
The state's public transit systems want $5.15 billion to avoid budget deficits and service cuts over the next half-decade. They’re expecting a tough fight.
Daniel Cameron was supposed to have the Republican nomination all sewn up at this point, but he, instead, finds himself under attack. Meanwhile, Oklahoma's legislating grinds to a halt and the motivating power of hatred.
Declining enrollment and poor completion rates raise concerns that underserved students and communities could be left behind. Gregory Haile, the president of Broward College, sees a way forward.
