Governance

Sports, unlike any other business, generates a sense of civic pride and community identity. New Yorkers don't cluster around the television to cheer on Wall Street investment bankers; Detroit citizens don't congregate in bars to watch Ford or GM workers build cars. But rooting for the Yankees and the Tigers and the Knicks and the Pistons is a natural communal activity. This web page identifies rules, and models, of organized and professional sports that allow us not only to root for the home team to win, but to root the home team in place. More

What level of government should exercise what kinds of authority? That question has been vigorously debated throughout U.S. history. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution itself represented a radical departure from the nation's original governance structure under the Articles of Confederation from 1776 to 1789. The Constitution established the supremacy of the federal government vis-a-vis the states, and political power has increasingly been centralized in Washington. The Civil War cemented this supremacy. By the turn of the 20th century, the Courts had interpreted the Constitution as giving states virtually unlimited power vis-a-vis their cities and counties. More

The New England town meeting and school district meeting are the only direct democracy institutions in the United States involving lawmaking by assembled voters. Law making by assembled adult males dates to the age of Pericles in Greece in the fifth century B.C. But the only other currently assembled voters' lawmaking body is the Landsgemeinde in a handful of Swiss cantons. More

On occasion, governments at the local, state and federal level make purchasing policies that take factors besides price into consideration. For instance, some state and local governments prefer to purchase locally manufactured products, all other things being equal. Government agencies frequently purchase recycled paper for their offices, or environmentally friendly cleaners for their janitorial service, even when the non-ecological option might be cheaper. More

In the United States, candidates for public office have always needed money to run for public office. To get it they have often depended on wealthy contributors expecting favors in return. In 1971, the federal government passed the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), in an attempt to combat this phenomenon. The FECA (which was amended several times until 1979) put a cap on the amount a single donor could contribute to a campaign for federal government, and required public disclosure of these contributions. More

While some reformers believe that campaign finance reform will cure many of the ills of our election process, others feel the key is proportional representation, or other, related reforms.  Some have begun to question the very equipment we use to vote. More

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) is leading the charge in encouraging communities around the country to enact some form of a Civil Liberties Safe Zone resolution. As of January 2003, at least 21 cities have passed some form of the resolution and similar efforts were underway in 26 states. The resolutions generally disallow the use of community resources to implement certain requirements of the 2002 USA Patriot Act, The Homeland Security Act and other executive orders passed after the terrorist attacks of 2001. More

As Greg LeRoy (GoodJobsFirst) points out, "As states grapple with their worst deficits in more than half a century, policymakers seek better data to help with budgeting decisions. But most states spend the bulk of their economic development budgets almost invisibly, in uncollected taxes, a.k.a. 'tax expenditures.'" More

While some reformers believe that campaign finance reform will cure many of the ills of our election process, others feel the key is proportional representation, or other, related reforms.

Proportional representation means electing representatives to our legislatures in proportion to their support in the population. Under our current system of winner-take-all elections in single-member districts, the representative for each district need have no more than 50 percent of the support in that district. Under Proportional Representation, ten one-seat districts might be combined into a single ten-seat district. A party or candidate that receives at least 10 percent of the vote in that district would win a seat. More

More than 100 large cities nationwide require their employees to live within city boundaries. But some of these laws have recently come under attack. Minnesota's state legislature has joined Michigan in passing a bill that forbids cities from enacting residency requirements. Residency opponents cite individual freedom of choice, while supporters refer to residency laws' positive effects on community. "The law worked," said Wes Skoglund, a Minnesota state representative from Minneapolis, in reference to his city's residency requirement enacted in 1994. "We started to see cops in church, in the supermarkets, at neighborhood meetings." More

Initiatives and referendums are one of this country's forms of direct democracy. There is no national initiative or referendum process in the United States, but they are allowed at the state and local levels. An initiative allows citizens to propose laws, by petition, to be placed on the ballot. A referendum allows citizens to reject laws or ordinances proposed by the state legislature or city council. The initiative process is used much more frequently than the referendum process and is considered by many the more important and powerful of the two processes. More

Logging communities (or agricultural and mining communities in general) gain little when their principal resource is exported unprocessed. In the case of wood, every million board feet of timber harvested in the United States in 1995 supported about 12 jobs in forestry and wood products manufacturing. In some areas, more than two-thirds of these jobs are in primary and secondary processing. (Lumber and pulp, for example, result from primary processing; secondary processing yields furniture, paper and other finished products). More

Some communities have passed laws that prevent serial law-breaking corporations from doing busines within their community.

Barnstead, New Hampshire, became the first municipal government in the United States to ban corporations from pumping out a drop of water for sale elsewhere. And it became the third municipal government, after Porter and Licking Townships in Pennsylvania, to decree that, within their jurisdictions, corporations may wield neither state nor federal constitutional powers.

Efforts to privatize government services in cities do not always save the city money, and can put municipal workers out of a job, often to be replaced with non-unionized workers or workers from out of town.