B&G REPORT.

We’re happy in our work life (and our home life as well). In fact, two of our favorite things we do professionally are writing the column you’re reading now and building this website. Yet barely a day goes by when something doesn’t frustrate or annoy us – often during our research – and we thought we’d share a few of these impediments to workplace bliss with you. We wonder how many of you are confronting the same challenges – and we invite you to send us any frustrations of

We’ve just come across a study titled “Best and Worst States to Be a Police Officer by WalletHub. This is just the kind of study that we like to follow for use on this website. In the study, California was ranked as the best. Then we took a moment to reflect on the findings of this research, and it struck us that it may not make sense to look at the best place to be a police officer by state when this is really a local issue. It could well be that it’s terrific to be an offic

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who works in state or local government to hear that many of our interviewees suggest – notwithstanding what ails their employer – that they’re going to solve many issues with new and improved technology. And to be sure, technology is increasingly an important part of any formula for success, and cities, counties and states that aren’t involved in improving their high-tech profile will be left behind. Still, as a state CIO characterized

In a “VOICES FROM ASPA" video that ran on this website a couple of weeks ago, Valerie Lemmie, senior advisor of state and local government at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, told us that “I am at times surprised how little our graduate students know about civics and then I am reminded that we don’t teach it in school anymore, you don’t learn it in high school. You don’t learn it in college. And so, it’s incumbent upon you, who are preparing for the profession (in public

We’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary series about the history of the Vietnam War. It’s a difficult series to watch, but fascinating, nonetheless. One point that the documentary makes is that, unlike other wars in which success was measured by the land overtaken, in Vietnam that didn’t apply as neither side ever really made any physical progress until after the end of the war, when North Vietnam prevailed and one nation emerged. As a result, during the war, the me

We don’t get it. Over the years, many cities and states have handed out tax incentives with the notion that they are supposed to have a good return on investment. They’re supposed to bring in jobs and have a ripple effect in neighborhoods in which the incentivized project is located. But that often seems to be an illusion. Elected officials nearly always play up the potential benefits and downplay costs. Fortunately, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board has a standard

“This is the last B&G Report we’ll be publishing in 2025 (the next new column will appear in this space on January 12, 2026 ) And so, we thought it only appropriate for us to look back at the columns we’ve done over the last year to pick out ten of our favorites – and provide them to our readers who may have missed them the first time around. Take a look, and as NBC used to say in a campaign to get people to watch its reruns, “If you haven’t seen it, it's new to you.” Unc

Every government makes mistakes from time to time. Sometimes, leaders acknowledge that a decision made in the past has gone awry and other times this news comes out through a performance audit or a press report. But as Robert Half, the late founder of the eponymous giant recruiting firm once said, “Not admitting a mistake is a bigger mistake.” We agree and yet we frequently see state and local governments and their leaders take that unfortunate path. Consider citizen surveys.

As anyone who has been reading our work in the past knows, we’re strong believers in making sure that there’s ample use of evidence when...

As we approach the last several weeks of December, our plan is to take a full vacation starting on December 14, continuing through New...

In 1799 when Napoleon was bearing down on Egypt a stone slab was discovered that came to be called the Rosetta Stone. It bore text in...

As we recently reported in the second of a two-part series about Trust In Government for Route Fifty, about 45% of Americans have a less...

Back some years ago, when we first started to evaluate management capacity in states, counties, and cities for the now defunct Financial...

Over the last few years, a whole bundle of things that happened in the state and local government world were attributed in some way to...

We are puzzled and frustrated with the ignorance of many people about the importance of state and local government management. They tend...

We’d probably be the subject of justifiable ridicule if we were to come out against the notion of work life balance in the public sector...

In the June issue of Government Finance Review, we have a column titled “Are Tax Incentives Good for Cities and States?” Though the...

Leaders in state and local governments persistently claim that they want to be more transparent, and we believe that this is a sincere...

As the federal government hands out money to states and localities for broadband services (and other infrastructure as well), one...

Over the course of years, we’ve given speeches about a variety of topics -- ranging from human resources to performance management to...