San Jose, Calif., which calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley and has grown to become the nation’s 10th biggest city, has had to shed more than a fifth of its workers in recent years to save money. It is, in a way, a microcosm of the nation, which has lost 668,000 state and local…
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In Alabama, a County That Fell Off the Financial Cliff
The New York Times ran a long article Saturday about the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, home of Birmingham, Alabama. There is no money for a lot of things around here, not since Jefferson County, population 658,000, went bankrupt last fall. There is no money for holiday D.U.I. checkpoints, litter patrols or overtime pay at the…
State and Local Budgets in 2011: The Crisis that Didn’t Happen (Yet?) – Brookings Institution
Brookings’ end of the year wrap-up of what happened and didn’t happen in 2011. The year’s top story in state and local government was “hundreds of billions of dollars” in municipal bond defaults. Oh wait, that didn’t happen. … 2011 was also the year that local property taxes finally dropped. The resilience of property tax revenues until…
Providence Urges Brown to Pay Up – WSJ.com
Interesting article about college towns (and cities) confronting private campuses over their property tax exemptions, focusing on Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s a commonly-known fact that colleges don’t pay property taxes, despite exerting heavy tolls (especially in policing and fire protection) from the local communities. Negotiations over what colleges and universities pay for…
Cuomo’s Cap on Property Taxes Rankles Communities – NYTimes.com
A much-heralded cap on property taxes championed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is encountering resistance as some communities across New York chafe at what amounts to a restriction on their spending and seek to exempt themselves from the new limits. This article ran back in October, but it highlights an issue that people don’t often…