B&G Report

After 23 years in government John Eller, the director of Social Services in Mecklenburg County, will leave his government job in mid-December. A lot of changes have occurred in his years in county government, and he has a wide variety of predictions, concerns and counsel for the changes that public health and human service agencies like his will face in future years. We talked with him this fall while we were researching our future of government jobs series for Route Fifty.

In the tension-filled political week before the midterm elections, we were particularly grateful for a relatively new podcast called “You Might be Right,” a mostly weekly, sometimes biweekly show that features two former governors from Tennessee talking about a wide variety of issues. The particularly refreshing part of this show for us is that Governor Bill Haslam is a Republican and Governor Phil Bredesen is a Democrat, and they talk to each other about complex issues in th

A couple of weeks ago, we made a request in the B&G Report for recommendations of books that would provide worthy reading for people who are interested in state and local government. We were gratified to get a number of responses (many of them having to do with cities, specifically). So, now it’s time for us to return the favor and publish nine of the titles that came in. We’ll be doing this again in the next couple of months, including many of the recommendations that came

by Marty Benison, Industry Executive Director for State and Local Government, Oracle ​ ​While the move to "Software as a Service (SaaS) started prior to the pandemic, it accelerated when citizens needed to continue to do business with governments at all levels, but now they have to do so remotely. This digital transformation is now ingrained in the fabric of most government organizations and is here to stay. This is good news. Moving systems to SaaS subscription models, taki

We’ve written columns for a variety of publications over the years ranging from the late, lamented Ladies’ Home Journal to Forbes to Government Finance Review. The problem in the column business has been that we’re always hopping from one topic to the next and can rarely even remember what ran last week or last month in which publication. That’s why we’ve been grateful that Route Fifty gave us the opportunity to devote a great deal of time over a few months to assembling a th

​ ​by Stephen B. Gordon, lead coordinator of the Continuity of Supply Initiative (CoSI) For the past two and a half years, times have not been good for state and local governments or the millions of the people they are -- or, once were -- responsible for serving. Since early 2020, more than a million people in the U.S. have died from the COVID-19 virus because, among other things, healthcare providers in the private, nonprofit, and sectors did not possess the vaccinations, th

We were fascinated by some of the most significant changes signaled in the recently released annual CIO survey from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. Our series about the future of state and local government jobs, is being published this week by Route Fifty. And based on our many interviews for those columns, we were heartened to see the reskilling of employees jump dramatically in its importance in the NASCIO CIO survey as the “single action” that