Dedicated to State and Local Government, State and Local Government Management, State and Local Performance Audit, State and Local Government Human Resources, State and Local Government Performance Measurement, State and Local Performance Management, State and Local Government Performance, State and Local Government Budgeting, State and Local Government Data, Governor Executive Orders.
Dedicated to State and Local Governments
State Budget Resources
Several years ago, we worked with the Volcker Alliance to created a guide to resources about state budgeting intended for use by public officials, policy advocates, journalists, academics, and concerned citizens.
​
In late September 2022, the Alliance updated the guide, which will once again provide up-to-date sources of information to provide a clear-eyed state-by-state financial outlook. You can find it by clicking here:
​
The guide provides a clickable map, which will lead you to a treasure trove of information about each of the fifty states.
“Understanding a state’s budget is never a one-step process, but our State Budget Sources guide gives you a central starting point,” said William Glasgall, Senior Director, Public Finance at the Volcker Alliance.
This resource links to budget sources for all fifty states as well
as legislative analyses of budget bills and treasurers’ or comptrollers’ monthly state cash flow statements; capital spending plans; reports on public worker pension funding and returns; and reports by local and national fiscal research organizations, bond rating firms, and associations of state fiscal and finance officials.
Guide to GOVs -- Updated for 2023
​
Do you ever need to quickly find out the name of a governor? Beyond that, do you ever need additional information about the fifty heads of the states -- like the names of their spouses, their term of office, their education and prior position?
For those of you who do, we're providing all this information and more (including interesting factoids) right here, fully updated to include the nine new governors elected in 2022. Just click right here for a reliable guide to this information as well as photos of the governors themselves.
Tell your colleagues and friends about this resource.
Executive Orders by State
Executive orders made by the President have been featured heavily in the news recently...
But we hear less about executive orders made by state governors. Barrett and Greene has put together an interactive map that makes it easy to find the executive orders put into effect by each state’s governor. You can access that map by clicking here.
The B&G Report: Quarterly subject guides to our blog posts
We realize that our blog does not (yet) have a good search mechanism. For that reason, our plan is to create quarterly subject guides to what we write in the blog.
The most recent subject guide (our second) covers the period from April 1 to June 30th, 2017. We have arranged the blog posts by topic, with the most recent posts listed first within each topic area. You can access our second quarterly guide by clicking here.
​
The first subject guide is arranged in the same manner and covers the posts we wrote between January 4 and March 31, 2017. (Our website was first launched in January, 2017). You can access the first guide by clicking here.
Dominant Words In State Of The State Addresses
You can learn a lot about a person by examining the words they use...
And when it comes to governor's state of the state addresses, the very specific words used by each governor speaks volumes about each state. We've put together an interactive map that links to a word cloud for every state showing the dominant words used in the 2017 state of the state addresses. We created these word clouds using Tagcrowd.com. You can access our map by clicking here.
Budget Transparency: What's New is Old
Are efforts to make budgets more transparent a new idea?
Watch this slideshow produced by Barrett and Greene Inc. to find out the answer. It was assembled and researched by Thomas Greitens, director of the Master of Public Administration program at Central Michigan University and was produced by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene for Barrett and Greene, Inc.
Which states are the best?
According to 2017's "State of the State" speeches, all of them!
Back in 2017, Barrett and Greene Inc. produced a video highlighting some of the superlatives governors used when talking about their states. You can watch it here.
