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Oct 15, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Carl Smith |Alan Greenblatt |Jared Brey
Right now, however, procurement is an opaque, outdated process. Worse: It fails to deliver what people need when they need it. These failures can have a dire impact on both communities and organizations. For example, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was so late paying nonprofits that provide homelessness services that it resorted to measures like taking out bank loans to make payroll, putting families at risk of losing temporary shelter.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
governing.com | Jared Brey |Stephen Goldsmith |Alan Ehrenhalt
If passed, the measure would give authority back to local governments to enact or change laws on rent control. For advocates, passing Proposition 33 would be a critical opportunity to address California’s housing crisis head-on. For the real estate industry, defeating Proposition 33 would mean maintaining the status quo in a market that has made billions for corporate landlords.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Ashley Silver |Zoe Manzanetti |Paul Taylor
In our program at the Harvard Kennedy School we explore exemplary data practices in city governments to identify the principles that will take municipal data use to the next level. In June we examined enterprise-wide systems enabling efficiency and community engagement in Nashville. Here we look at another of the most effective local government agencies, Dallas’ Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence, known as DBI.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Carl Smith |Thad Rueter |Jared Brey
Entrepreneurship is vital to ensuring economic opportunity in every community. Nearly all of the nation’s net job growth is created by new and young businesses, and research shows that for every 1 percent increase in the entrepreneurship rate the poverty rate decreases by 2 percent. That’s why it’s so important that state and local governments examine how their contracting impacts young businesses, determine whether that process is a barrier and take supportive action.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Jabari Simama
Those investments and jobs may hang in the balance if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump has vowed to dismantle Biden’s climate policy. A frequent critic of electric cars, he’s taken aim at pollution rules that incentive automakers to sell more EVs and could curtail the IRA’s EV tax credits. Representative Buddy Carter, a Republican whose district is home to the gigafactory, didn’t vote for the IRA — no Republicans in Congress did.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Jabari Simama
In a document recently filed with the city, Sean C. Tyler said he saw Feldstein Soto order a supervisor to look through the emails of Michelle McGinnis, then the head of the office's criminal branch. Tyler, an administrative coordinator, also believes that Feldstein Soto searched his own email account. Tyler and McGinnis have criticized Feldstein Soto and her team in recent months, both in the workplace and in separate claims for damages.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Betsy Gardner |William D. Eggers |Jared Brey
For a city government to furnish high-quality service, engage well with its communities and solve challenging issues, it must operate as an enterprise, not as a collection of discrete agencies. And that approach requires not just application programming interfaces and point solutions but an enterprise system — a technology platform and data-sharing policies that further citywide solutions and enterprisewide data literacy.
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May 6, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Alan Greenblatt |Jabari Simama
One in an occasional series of articles about issues that are likely to return for debate in next year's session of the Iowa Legislature. Ellen Bengtson was riding her bicycle near Charles City on a sunny Sunday evening in 2020 when she was killed by a driver who was opening an app on his cellphone. Ellen Bengtson rides during the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa in 2018, two years before she died after being hit by a pickup truck near Charles City.
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May 6, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Alan Greenblatt |Jabari Simama
Zavala was grateful for the job, which eventually paid more than $150,000 a year and included perks such as free housing and a new truck. Grateful enough, he later testified in state court, that when he learned the public agency he worked for was stealing water from the federal government he kept his mouth shut. For years. And then one day in 2016, FBI agents showed up at his house.
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May 6, 2024 | 
governing.com | Stephen Goldsmith |Alan Greenblatt |Jabari Simama
A review of new state market share data and financial filings shows the void left by the failed companies has largely been filled in two ways. Some of the market has been gobbled up by new firms that structurally resemble the ones that failed. And the rest has mostly gone to Louisiana Citizens, the state-backed insurer of last resort, which by law charges policyholders above-market rates. All of it raises further concerns about the health of Louisiana's insurance marketplace.
