What power do US mayors really have?
Author and legal scholar Richard Schragger says the US's big-city mayors focus on policies far outside their control and lose sight of the ways they can actually effect change.
Government / Budgets
Budgets
This time could be different: Governments have alternatives to austerity
State and local officials in the US are faced with a lot of bad options, but they don't have to cut jobs and services.
Cities now have less money to drive the green transition
The financial fallout from Covid-19 is starting to affect local governments' renewable-energy transition plans and climate action efforts.
The pandemic is flipping the script on funding local government
Relying on targeted taxes and fees has proved troublesome this year, while property taxes look like a relatively safe bet.
The economic risks of slashing local government jobs
As cities and states across the US face stark budget decisions, recent history in Wisconsin provides an object lesson in what can happen when a public-sector workforce shrinks.
Absent aid, few US cities will be able to avoid austerity
Congress appears unlikely to help with the looming Covid-related budget disaster that nearly every local government in America now faces. And cuts in the public sector will only worsen the recession.
A looming fiscal crisis raises another fear for US cities: State oversight and financial control boards
Municipal finance experts worry the pandemic economy may revive some fraught methods for cutting city budgets.
The reality of US city budgets: Police funding eclipses most other agencies’
City Monitor analysed the past three years of general-fund budgets from US cities that have seen major or noteworthy protests in 2020.
Post-pandemic, the risk to public transport is that it might never be the same
Unpacking the financial reality of mass transit's uncertain future.
