(Press-News.org) Freezing positions and cutting workforces
Trimming pension and health care costs and passing them to employees
Lowering service delivery levels, but not imposing many new fees
Using technology to reduce costs where possible
Receiving added pressure but little help from States and the Federal Government
This important new research sheds light on the challenges faced by city and county governments that must provide most basic services. Unlike federal or state governments, these local governments have limited ability to generate revenue and are often mandated to pay for and deliver services by those other governments. As the authors indicate, most local governments have already reduced expenditures and exhausted their resources to generate revenue. Furthermore, several prominent local governments have declared bankruptcy and as this article documents, other local governments may follow suit.
Other articles in this Special Issue take up complementary themes. In "The 'New Normal' for Local Government," Lawrence L. Martin, Richard Levey, and Jenna Cawley wrote that local governments will face real economic problems as a result of the recession as $225 billion was taken from city and county governments. They recommended a list of options to adjust to the "New Normal," most interestingly, educating the public about trade-offs between having and paying for services.
In "The Future of Local Government: Will Current Stresses Bring Major, Permanent Changes?" David N. Ammons, Karl W. Smith, and Carl W. Stenberg wrote that the changes caused by the Great Recession are not permanent. Instead, they view the Recession as a result of years of gradual changes in the U.S. local government system and wrote that reductions in spending and employment and changes in government structure and services will not be permanent for most cities.
Two other articles on local governments' reactions to the crisis complete the issue. Kimberly L. Nelson's article "Municipal Choices during a Recession: Bounded Rationality and Innovation," evaluates the ways governments have responded to Recession-related changes theoretically and empirically, but finds no set patterns, asserting that it is too soon to determine trends. In "Managing through Collaborative Networks: A Twenty-First Century Mandate for Local Government," Michael Abels proposes forming collaborative networks of local governments to employ economies of scale to provide the same or more services with fewer resources.
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This Special Issue, titled "The New Normal: Local Governments After the Great Recession" is a collaboration between SLGR and the National Association of Counties and National League of Cities. For access to full texts of the articles, please contact Camille Gamboa at camille.gamboa@sagepub.com.
State and Local Government Review (SLGR), peer-reviewed and published four times/year, provides a forum for the exchange of ideas among practitioners and academics that contributes to the knowledge and practice of state and local government politics, policy, and management. Of particular interest in SLGR are articles that focus on state and local governments and those that explore the intergovernmental dimensions of public-sector activity.
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. www.sagepublications.com
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When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Atlantic on Sept. 11 it caught Tropical Storm Leslie's clouds over Newfoundland and peanut-shaped Tropical Storm Michael to its southwest. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured infrared data on Tropical Storms Leslie and Michael when it passed overhead on Sept. 11.
Michael Appears Peanut-Shaped on Satellite Imagery
Tropical Storm Michael forecast to become a remnant low later today, Sept. 11, but as of 11 a.m. EDT Michael still had maximum sustained winds near 45 mph (75 kmh). It was located about 1,090 ...
A couple of years ago, Hesham Rakha misjudged a yellow traffic light and entered an intersection just as the light turned red. A police officer handed him a ticket.
"There are circumstances, as you approach a yellow light, where the decision is easy. If you are close to the intersection, you keep going. If you are far away, you stop. If you are almost at the intersection, you have to keep going because if you try to stop, you could cause a rear-end crash with the vehicle behind you and would be in the middle of the intersection anyway," said Rakha, professor of civil ...
Researchers from Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center and University of Montreal have identified several novel genes that make some children more efficient than others in the way their immune system responds to malaria infection. This world-first in integrative efforts to track down genes predisposing to specific immune responses to malaria and ultimately to identify the most suitable targets for vaccines or treatments was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by lead author Dr. Youssef Idaghdour and senior author Pr. Philip Awadalla, whose ...
The ageing process has its roots deep within the cells and molecules that make up our bodies. Experts have previously identified the molecular pathway that react to cell damage and stems the cell's ability to divide, known as cell senescence.
However, in cells that do not have this ability to divide, such as neurons in the brain and elsewhere, little was understood of the ageing process. Now a team of scientists at Newcastle University, led by Professor Thomas von Zglinicki have shown that these cells follow the same pathway.
This challenges previous assumptions ...
Philadelphia, PA, September 12, 2012 – Post-stroke depression is a major issue affecting approximately 33% of stroke survivors. A new study published in the current issue of Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation reports that the level to which survivors are uncertain about the outcome of their illness is strongly linked to depression. The relationship is more pronounced for men than for women.
"Male stroke survivors in the US who subscribe to traditional health-related beliefs may be accustomed to, and value highly, being in control of their health," says ...
DNA consists of regions called exons, which code for the synthesis of proteins, interspersed with noncoding regions called introns. Being able to predict the different regions in a new and unannotated genome is one of the biggest challenges facing biologists today. Now researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi have used techniques from information theory to identify DNA introns and exons an order of magnitude faster than previously developed methods. The researchers were able to achieve this breakthrough in speed by looking at how electrical charges are ...
Scientists who study tissue engineering and test new drugs often need to sort, rotate, move, and otherwise manipulate individual cells. They can do this by prodding the cells into place with a mechanical probe or coaxing them in the desired direction with acoustic waves, electric fields, or flowing fluids. Techniques that rely on direct physical contact can position individual cells with a high level of precision while non-contact techniques are often faster for sorting large numbers of cells. An international team of researchers has now developed a way to manipulate cells ...
Probe storage devices read and write data by making nanoscale marks on a surface through physical contact. The technology may one day extend the data density limits of conventional magnetic and optical storage, but current probes have limited lifespans due to mechanical wear. A research team, led by Intel Corp., has now developed a long-lasting ultrahigh-density probe storage device by coating the tips of the probes with a thin metal film. The team's device features an array of 5,000 ultrasharp probes that is integrated with on-chip electronic circuits. The probes write ...
Cancer chemotherapy can be a life-saver, but it is fraught with severe side effects, among them an increased risk of infection. Until now, the major criterion for assessing this risk has been the blood cell count: if the number of white blood cells falls below a critical threshold, the risk of infection is thought to be high. A new model built by Weizmann Institute mathematicians in collaboration with physicians from the Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba and from the Hoffmann-La Roche research center in Basel, Switzerland, suggests that for proper risk assessment, it is ...
The New York & New Jersey Minority Supplier Development Council (The Council) takes networking on the road on Friday, September 14 when corporate supplier diversity executives and minority business owners ride a New Jersey Transit train to New Brunswick at the annual "Train Ride to Success."
The Council's highly anticipated annual event kicks-off at New York Penn Station at 9:30am when the New York group meets to board the reserved railroad car. "Train Ride to Success" event concludes at 3:00pm in New Brunswick.
At "Train Ride to Success, ...
