B&G REPORT.

The future of state and local budgets is never entirely clear, but as things stand right now, it appears as though we’re heading for a time when there may need to be a lot of belt-tightening. There are a handful of ways that many entities approach shortfalls of cash, including cutting back on services and raising taxes. But neither is particularly popular for residents who aren’t entirely clear about the pain that budget offices face in trying to construct a balanced budget.

As a growing number of state and local employees are heading toward retirement, the conversation generally focuses on how to retain them or how to recruit their replacements. Both are certainly important questions, but they leave out a critical issue that confronts entities from coast to coast: The loss of institutional memory. From our vantage point, covering state and local government for decades, it repeatedly comes as a surprise to us when we interview someone in a reason

One of the goals we have for our website content is to give academics the opportunity to communicate their significant findings with practitioners. We’re rather zealous about this, because we see the gap between the work that comes from universities and their actual use in the public sector as one of the biggest missed opportunities for governments. So, for example, in just the last months, we’ve featured Guest Columns from professors at Kean University, Augusta University, U

As readers of this website know, we’re always on the lookout for exciting new programs and policies in state and local government. There are plenty of them out there. Not only do they provide fodder for this space, but we’re always pleased to share them with our friends, many of whom have come to believe that nothing good is happening in government today. But here’s our problem. After some time passes and we want to refer again to our original discovery, it’s often the case t

For many years, our work about cities focused largely on those that had large populations. It always felt like we were doing our jobs well when we were able to interview a mayor, a city manager or administrator of cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Seattle, Denver, and so on. But for a variety of reasons, over the last couple of years, we’ve been focusing more on smaller entities. In so doing, we’re writing about places that make up the bulk of the nation