B&G REPORT.

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

Special revenue funds are a well-established way for governments to earmark money for specific uses so that promised cash isn’t sometimes diverted due to temporary political preferences. As Investopedia explains, “special revenue funds are created by governments for specific projects to ensure financial accountability and transparency to taxpayers. These funds are distinct from general, capital, and rainy-day funds in government budgets.” Although special funds have many laud

Two weeks ago, we were in a conversation with a couple of smart local government observers, and we mentioned that our work relied regularly on performance audits. The conversation took place on Zoom and so we were able to tell that our words seemed to be a bit mystifying to them. That led us to a few polite queries, which uncovered the sad truth – they were pretty much unaware of the existence of performance audits altogether. We believe, modestly, that we may make as good or

In many cities, counties and states, human resource departments traditionally require that departing employees do exit interviews before they walk out the door for the last time. Sometimes this involves filling out a simple form and elsewhere there’s a brief conversation involved. One of the potential benefits of these exercises is to help cut down on turnover, by fixing any problems that led to a departure. But, ultimately, how useful are these efforts? From what we’ve been

We’re big fans of progress. In fact, many years ago, we were the first people in our circle to have home computers. (They were IBMs with big floppy disks and no hard drives and we absolutely loved them). That said, we’ve become increasingly aware of instances in which current technologies, designed to create efficiency, can have deficits over the previous ways of doing things in state and local government. Take, for example, the telephone. A number of surveys have shown that