Michael A. Pagano

Local Budgeting and Finance: 25 Years of Developments

This article traces developments in budgeting and finance at the local government level over the past 25 years. In doing so, it uses the 290 related articles published in Public Budgeting & Finance over this period as its foundation and as a sieve for topic selection. Specific attention is directed to intergovernmental finance, financial management, budgeting and budget reform, alternative service delivery, and capital budgeting. The intent is to sift through important developments in each area, highlight their significance at the time and their importance to the present and future.

Transforming America’s Cities Policies and Conditions of Vacant Land

City governments own or regulate vacant land and abandoned structures. In this article, the authors summarize new vacant-land survey data, examine the conditions and causes of vacant land, analyze city policy toward vacant land, and explore the possible interconnections among conditions, causes, and policies. They find that vacant land most often is associated with cities that have expanded their political boundaries, and the number of abandoned structures is related to a city’s change in population. Thus vacant land and abandoned structures are not interchangeable indicators of decay and destruction; rather, they have separate causes and need different policies.

What Factors Affect Management Quality?: State Infrastructure Management and the Government Performance Project

Whether the US

State-Local Relations in the 1990s:

131 billion set aside for infrastructure projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 can make a lasting contribution to improving the nation’s public infrastructure will depend, in part, on the quality of infrastructure management systems and practices in the states. In this article, we examine the factors that influence how well state governments plan for and manage public infrastructure using results from the 2005 and 2008 Government Performance Project. The pooled Tobit regression analysis shows that capital management quality is affected by political variables such as divided legislatures and legislative term limits, fiscal institutions including tax and expenditure limits, and environmental demand factors, specifically the extent of urbanization.

Attributes of Development Tools: Success and Failure in Local Economic Development

This article extrapolates into the next decade the probable changes in state-local relations and emphasizes three central themes: (1) fiscal federalism, (2) localism, and (3) state-local cooperation. The principal argument is that the nature, success, and prognosis of state-local relations for the foreseeable future depend largely on the fiscal health of state and local governments and the fiscal ties between the two sets of governments. Demands for constitutional and statutory autonomy for local governments, levels of satisfaction and discord between state and local governments, and the flexibility and constraints imposed upon the revenue-generating capacity of local governments reflect the larger and more dominant variable of fiscal well-being.

Cities and Fiscal Federalism in the Trump Era: A Discussion

This article examines the attributes of local economic development policy instruments and asks whether these attributes can predict (1) project success as defined in archival data and in interviews of city officials, and (2) revenue generation as defined in conventional return on investment terms. Based on our analyses of quantitative and qualitative data from 40 city-supported development projects nationwide, the lesson for development projects designed or supported because of their revenue-generating potential appears to be that the citys economic condition is an important predictor of the revenue-generating success of a project. Further, the less complicated and the more routine or standard the bundle of incentives offered (especially by economically healthy cities), the greater the probability of revenue-generating success. Project success, however, is related to other factors. The more controversial the project, the more likely that down the road, the city will have an unsuccessful development project on its hands. Knowing the political risk of a project aids in predicting the success of the project.

Federalism, E-Commerce and Public Finance in the USA

The purpose of this article is to explore the intergovernmental finance framework with an emphasis on the impacts of the current administration’s proposals on cities, including not just direct financial transfers but also changes to the federal tax code that have implications for municipal finance. In particular, we examine the impacts of two policies—reduced funding of community development block grant and federal income tax reform—to illustrate the effects of federal reform on local governments in the context of American federalism. We contend that the resiliency of local governments to exogenous shocks such as changes in federal policy is contingent on economic resources and institutional constraints imposed by state governments.

Local Infrastructure: Intergovernmental Grants and Urban Needs

When delegates from the first states met in 1787, as required by the Articles of Confederation, many of the delegates believed that the current constitutional arrangement provided too few, if any, powers to a centralizing authority. The delegates began to redraft a second constitution of the USA that would clearly delineate those responsibilities of the central or general government as apart and distinct from the powers that resided with the sovereign states. Among the powers of the central government included the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” In other words, while the federal government was granted the authority to regulate interstate commerce, state governments were explicitly denied the power to interfere with interstate commerce. Any action taken by states to regulate interstate commerce, then, would violate the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution and, therefore, be null and void.

Developing an Evaluation Design for the Senior Executive Service

In the 20 years since “obsolete” infrastructure was discovered as a public policy problem by the academic and policy communities (see Peterson, 1978), federal and state infrastructure programs have been proposed, debated, and, in many cases, implemented—but frequently they have not. Yet, as much as policy makers would like to learn from these programs or be informed by theories about grant designs, the literature and evaluations on these infrastructure programs do not speak with one voice; conflicting conclusions and policy recommendations abound. The purpose of this article is to sketch out some elements of an infrastructure grants research agenda that are in need of clarification, specification, and rethinking. In particular, this article examines reasons for infrastructures relative invisibility in municipal budgeting, the design and intended effects of infrastructure grants policy by federal and state governments, and future issues surrounding infrastructure.

Vacant Land in Cities: An Urban Resource

In 1979, the Office of Personnel Management requested that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) plan an evaluation study to assess the impact of the Senior Executive Service (SES) on the department. An evaluability assess ment was conducted which produced an agreed-upon model of the SES program design and a clear basis for a longitudinal evaluation study. This paper summarizes the conclusions of the HHS/SES evaluability assessment.