Who would have thought that managing a city could be so funny? “The Mayor Married Who?” provides a fun insider’s look at the daily challenges, unexpected curve balls, occasionally embarrassing failures and successful triumphs that local elected officials and professional administrators face every day in our city halls and county halls of administration.

Have you ever given 24-hour notice and walked out on your job? Have you ever had an outdoor campsite named in your honor or a plane pull a banner thanking you for your public service? Have you ever opened a successful, but illegal business, and have state authorities shut you down? Have you ever negotiated a serious business deal wearing a clown costume, full face makeup and a multi-colored wig? Have you ever broken your boss’s arm? Have you ever built a 14,000 square foot building on a property that you did not own? Have you ever cost your employer $900,000…or $3.75 million…and kept your job?

Through short stories capturing a 40-year city management career, Tim Casey’s sense of humor, passion for public service and compassion for others permeate every chapter of this book. “The Mayor Married Who?” is a must read for local government officials and employees, public administration educators and students, and anyone who has ever had occasion to contact their city hall with a complaint or request for service. But even if you can’t name your mayor or city executive or have never had any dealings with your city/local government, Tim’s stories are sure to bring a smile to your face. Enjoy the read!!

The paperback version can be purchased through Amazon for $15.95 or for $14.36 directly from Outskirts Press through the author’s webpage.

The Kindle version can be purchased through Amazon for $9.99.

The PDF Download can be purchased for $5.00 directly from Outskirts Press through the author’s webpage.

When Sheryl Sculley was recruited to serve as San Antonio's new city manager in 2005, the organization she inherited was a disorganized mess.  City infrastructure was crumbling, strong financial policies and systems were nonexistent, many executive positions were vacant, public satisfaction was low, ethical standards were weak, and public safety union salaries and benefits were outpacing revenues, crowding out other essential city services.  Simply put:  San Antonio was on the verge of collapse.

Greedy Bastards tells the story of Sheryl and her new team's uphill battle to turn around San Antonio city government.  She takes you behind closed doors to share the hard changes she made and the strategies she used to create mutually beneficial solutions to the city's biggest problems.

Many of the issues Sheryl found in San Antonio are present in cities across the U.S.  Packed with wins and losses, lessons learned, and pitfalls encountered, Greedy Bastards is a guidebook for any city official tasked with turning around a struggling city.

Sheryl has been a highly regarded leader within the professional city management ranks for several decades. Her experience, ethics, and courage have enabled her to tackle some of local governments biggest challenges in Phoenix and San Antonio, two of the largest council-manager cities in the United States. Sharing her vast experience in this book will certainly benefit thousands of local government professionals.
— Marc Ott, Executive Director, International City/County Management Association

Not since the recession of 2007-2009 have local governments faced economic challenges as severe as those they have encountered in early 2020. With little warning, they have found themselves facing the “COVID-19 Recession.”

Many of the steps local governments and their state-level partners took to safeguard public health and safety by slowing the spread of the coronavirus—lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, the closure of schools and “nonessential” businesses—had direct and devastating effects on local government organizations and budgets.

Lockdowns were accompanied by a corresponding decline in shopping, dining, tourism, and other sources of tax revenue. School closures imposed an additional burden on employees with children. Many local government workers were strained and often demoralized as they adapted to new ways of doing business from remote locations and struggled to incorporate home schooling into their daily routines.

But local governments and their employees have demonstrated time and time again that they can be resilient and adaptable when faced with new challenges—and ICMA has a wealth of resources that can help. We scoured Public Management (PM) magazine to identify the most important archived articles to help your organization and community persevere and thrive through these economic challenges.

• Learn lessons from previous recessions that affected local government.
• Reshape your local government and build employee spirit, passion, and commitment and, ultimately, organizational capacity.
• Gain leadership strategies to help your organization in the midst of turmoil and fear, and, in the process, demonstrate your value.
• Develop financial strategies that will inspire pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm throughout the organization so that staff and employees are inspired to work together to make the organization financially sustainable.

As author Edward Everett says in closing his article: “Be a Leader – Don’t Be Afraid - Slay this Dragon!”

ICMA members and PM subscribers can access the ebook by clicking below (you will need a username and password to login and access):

Public Management (PM) magazine is included in ICMA membership. Annual subscriptions are available to nonmembers for $50 ($155 for international subscribers). To subscribe, order through the ICMA Press online bookstore. Or you can call 202/289-4262 (prompt zero) or e-mail subscriptions@icma.org.

[Note: You may need to login or setup an account to access the online bookstore and subscribe]

Discover new arenas that shape the “warp and woof” of budgets and the policies and processes managers use to craft spending decisions.

Navigating the increasingly complex crosscurrents of local government finance has become an essential skill for today’s public administrator. The convergence of rising expectations from citizens and council members, anemic growth in revenue sources, and unfunded pensions now coming due has complicated the local manager’s task of preparing a budget that balances revenues with expenditures. More fundamentally, today’s managers must deliver services at a time when public confidence in government and its ability to perform have reached unparalleled lows.

This book examines the issues that a local manager confronts in developing a budget— both the choice of public services and projects to provide, and the choice of revenue sources used to pay for them. When formulating a budget, the manager must balance what is economically best, politically expedient, and administratively possible. Because the manager must also respond to citizens’ perceptions of an issue, whatever their accuracy, this book also examines budgets in those terms. In a more general sense, effective leadership requires that the public administrator shape as well as follow public opinion. The recommendations made throughout this book are designed to enhance citizens’ confidence in the responsiveness and competence of local government leaders.

Here's a snapshot of what you can expect in A Budgeting Guide for Local Government, Fourth Edition:

• An expansion on themes introduced in previous editions. As the public sector’s equivalent of a broker, the budget analyst brings together producers and consumers of local services, thereby transforming the budget process into a commodity exchange for those services. Although local governments have adopted more entrepreneurial methods of management, Bland and Overton provide the reasons why budgeting processes in the private sector cannot (and should not) be replicated in the public arena.
• A call on local managers to embrace truth-in-budgeting—creating an organizational culture that ensures the budget office is a dependable source of credible analyses. Good budgeting effectively links inputs (capital and labor) with outcomes. As the authors note, divining the linkage between inputs and their impact on the community is the key budget problem that managers must wrestle with.
• Practical guidance on how managers can effectively communicate budget information with their stakeholders and elevate the legitimacy of local government. Fiscal crises precipitated by natural or human actions impact budgets differently depending on their severity and duration.
• Specific strategies for responding to and mitigating the range of crises that can potentially strike a local government. The greatest challenge for balancing local budgets remains finding sufficient revenues to fund the services communities expect. Bland and Overton skillfully navigate the complex terrain of revenue policy and administration.
• Assessment of the impact of property tax exemptions on local budgets and the strategies used to compensate for the lost revenue. The authors provide an updated assessment of the general and excise sales taxes and the limited applicability of a local income tax. One of the bright spots for local revenues has been the steady shift toward charges on users of services.
• An introduction to a typology of strategies for structuring prices that give managers a clear understanding of the tradeoffs that must be made when designing a price structure.

About the Authors

Robert L. (Bob) Bland is professor of public administration at the University of North Texas, where he has been on the faculty since 1982 and teaches graduate courses in public finance, governmental accounting, and budgeting. He is the author of A Revenue Guide for Local Government (2nd ed., 2005) and A Budgeting Guide for Local Government (3rd ed., 2013), both published by ICMA, as well as of several articles on the municipal bond market, property taxation, and municipal budgeting. In 2007 he was the first recipient of the Terrell Blodgett Academician Award presented by the Texas City Management Association; he also received ICMA’s Stephen B. Sweeney Academic Award in October 2007. In 2012, Professor Bland was elected as a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration. He received his BS from Pepperdine University, his MPA and MBA from the University of Tennessee, and his PhD from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at bbland@unt.edu.

Michael R. Overton is an assistant professor of public administration at the University of Idaho. His research explores the intersection of local government management and fiscal policy, specifically focusing on local government competition, economic development, and transportation financing issues. His research into these areas has been funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, SMART Transit, and the North Central Texas Council of Governments. In 2015, he received the University of North Texas’s Toulouse Dissertation Award in Social Science. In 2016 he was selected for the Emerging Scholars Award by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and in 2017 he was selected as a Founders Fellow by the American Society of Public Administration.

Survey of local government sustainability practices, which was a joint project of ICMA, the Sustainable Communities and Small Town and Rural Planning Divisions of the American Planning Association, Binghamton University, Cornell University, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Survey sought to understand how local governments engage issues of sustainability.

This ICMA signature survey, conducted every five years, examines the service delivery choices, practices, and policies of local governments.

Mike.Conduff@TheElimGroup.com | 940-453-3116 (Mobile) | 940-382-3945 (Office) | www.TheElimGroup.com

While life in the fishbowl of public management is never easy, it is often especially challenging for women professionals.  In many cases a woman has been a “first” or even an “only” and being the "first" or the "only" can be demandingly difficult – and also remarkably rewarding.

Following on the incredible success of Democracy at the Doorstep – True Stories from the Green Berets of Public Administrators, this collection of more true stories deals exclusively with women professionals and showcases the exceptional commitment that these “special forces experts” bring to their field.  The stories are inspirational, insightful, and instructional.  You will laugh out loud at some, cry at others, and be amazed at them all with the barriers experienced and overcome, the innovations instituted, and the lessons learned and taught.

Democracy works because local government works and women professionals are a key component of both!

Price: $19.95 plus shipping and handling (All net proceeds go to the Life, Well Run! campaign). Contact Mike Conduff at mike.conduff@democracyatthedoorstep.com for purchase information.

If I was to re-write the title of this book (available at Amazon.com) to one more specific  for the local government manager it would read- Finding the Energy to Serve My Community: How I Countered the Impacts of Cancer, Cynicism and Age with the Healing Practice of Way of Harmony Qigong. Qigong is an ancient Chinese art translated in English as “energy work”. The slow, meditative, deep breathing and stretching movements of Qigong allow practitioners to tap into the potential healing energy within their bodies as well as the universal energy without. I give the practice of Qigong a lot of credit for helping me heal and recover from 3 cancer surgeries and radiation treatments. While I started traditional Qigong practice to help heal and support the survival of my physical body, I created the Way of Harmony Qigong System, including 7 simple exercise forms, to support my political and emotional survival as a Town Administrator.

Out of necessity my role as local government administrator is often one of coordinator, facilitator, harmonizer and balancer of interests. Without a strong daily disciplined emphasis on finding authentic harmony, remaining open and vulnerable in relationships, and a willingness to forgive and be tolerant I could not survive in my role, nor could our local community or body politic.

Way of Harmony Qigong helps me to start each day filled with the positive energy (physically and spiritually) I need to serve my community. I hope local government managers will find the insights and movements of Way of Harmony Qigong valuable as they work at the front lines of our democratic republic and are key figures in determining whether our country’s political future will be one of harmony, collaboration and unity or distrust, divisiveness and separation.

You can purchase the book here.

A History of Community Sustainability and Beginning the Elimination of Racial Redlining in the St. Louis Metro Area 1959 - 1975 describes this inner ring suburb of St. Louis’ remarkable achievements in sustaining a middle class (middle income) society while successfully creating a very racially diverse community starting in the early 1960s and still continuing today. Following and even before the UCity council resolution declaring the policy of equal rights to housing in UCity, the community had been demonstrating daily that black middle class families are as or even more willing to maintain their homes and yards in well maintained neighborhoods.  By the 1970s all residential neighborhoods were well maintained and have remained so for the next 40 years and most are multiracial. 


Also in the early 1970s UCity’s Delmar Boulevard and its business district, which extends from the city of St. Louis into UCity, started to and continues to flourish.  UCity had by then completed several renewal projects, and had succeeded in eliminating within its borders racial redlining by the federal government.  By 2007, its Delmar Loop was designated by the American Planning Association to be one of the ten great streets in America.  Thus, for at least the last 30 years, this community has sustained a healthy real estate market with property values within its entire 5.88 square miles appreciating with the national economy trends.

Obviously useful to city managers and other local government officials are the many described programs and techniques for preserving structures, landscaping, entire neighborhoods and the city itself.  The most effective of which has been the Occupancy Permit Program.  Already many cities in St. Louis County have installed such in order to preserve both their schools and city neighborhoods.  Also, in the late 1960s, Pasadena and other California cities adopted, and still use, the Occupancy Permit Program.