Yule Heibel's Library tagged municipal_government →  View Popular, Search in Google

So true, about the corruption of the attitude of public service:
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Over the past dec­ade the city of San Jose had repeatedly caved to the demands of its public-safety unions. In practice this meant that when the police or fire department of any neighboring city struck a better deal for itself, it became a fresh argument for improving the pay of San Jose police and fire. The effect was to make the sweetest deal cut by public-safety workers with any city in Northern California the starting point for the next round of negotiations for every other city. The departments also used each other to score debating points. For instance, back in 2002, the San Jose police union cut a three-year deal that raised police officers’ pay by 18 percent over the contract. Soon afterward, the San Jose firefighters cut a better deal for themselves, including a pay raise of more than 23 percent. The police felt robbed and complained mightily until the city council crafted a deal that handed them 5 percent more premium pay in exchange for training to fight terrorists. “We got famous for our anti-terrorist-training pay,” explains one city official. Eventually the anti-terrorist-training premium pay stopped; the police just kept the extra pay, with benefits. “Our police and firefighters will earn more in retirement than they did when they were working,” says Reed. “There used to be an argument that you have to give us money or we can’t afford to live in the city. Now the more you pay them the less likely they are to live in the city, because they can afford to leave. It’s staggering. When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working? There’s a corruption here. It’s not just a financial corruption. It’s a corruption of the attitude of public service.”
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california michael_lewis vanity_fair municipal_funding municipal_government public_service debt

Cities/ metropolitan areas dominate the US economy: 12% of land mass, but 2/3s of population and 75% of gross domestic product. But municipal governments remain small and a crazy quilt:
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There are benefits associated with intense localism. Citizens feel a closer connection to their local officials (although does anyone really know the boundaries of their local library district?). And, in theory, individuals and firms can shop around for the government that most closely matches their preferred mix of efficiency, service and taxes.

Yet the drawbacks of fragmented governance far outweigh the benefits.

Fragmentation keeps government weak. With the landscape chopped into thousands of municipalities and special bodies, most local governments remain tiny, nearly amateur concerns, unequal to the widening challenges of global competition, suburbanization, revitalization and economic development.

Many states are bedeviled by what David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., has called a crazy quilt of "little box governments and limited horizons." In geographical terms, little boxes ensure that in almost every region scores of archaic boundaries artificially divide areas that otherwise represent single, interrelated social, economic and environmental communities. Such divisions complicate efforts to carry out cross-boundary visioning, plan cooperatively or coordinate decision-making across large areas.
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wsj_opinion wsj.com bruce_katz municipal_government cities governance

Frances Bula reports on Vancouver City Council's plans to make city information and statistics publicly accessible:
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The idea is that everyone from programmers to curious residents could use city data to do anything from tracking their garbage-truck driver on his route to mapping where the worst landlords' buildings are.

The notion - being pioneered in such places as Toronto, Washington and San Francisco - is that the more information people have, the more cities can tap into the collective energy of their residents to develop new applications or get more involved in the way the city works.
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vancouver public_data ubiquity information municipal_government