Local governments, once a steady source of employment in tough economic times, are shedding jobs in unprecedented numbers, and heavy payroll losses are expected to persist into next year.
The job cuts by city and county governments are helping offset modest private-sector employment gains, restraining broader job growth.
“They’ll continue to be a drag on the overall (employment) numbers and the economy,” says Wells Fargo economist Mark Vitner.
Ten years after tiny St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was destroyed by falling rubble from the World Trade Center towers, church leaders reached an agreement Friday (Oct. 14) to rebuild at Ground Zero.
The church, founded by Greek immigrants in 1916, sat in the shadow of the twin towers and was the only religious building to be completely destroyed during the 9/11 attacks.
Under the agreement brokered by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the church agreed to drop a lawsuit filed in February against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls rebuilding at Ground Zero.
Occupy Charleston is a local version of the Occupy Wall Street movement that has spread across the country. No one at this point is predicting how many people might turn out for the 99 hours of camping, music, cooking, free speech, educational events and smaller-size marches to area banks.
The toll hikes are more than chump change: Cash tolls on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge jumped to $4 from $2.50, and to $12 from $8 on all the New York-New Jersey Hudson River crossings.
The trend reflects tough economic times and growing uncertainty in state capitols about the future of federal road money. Congress has repeatedly delayed approval of a multiyear funding bill for highway projects.
The tolling also highlights the intensifying national debate over how the USA should pay to maintain and improve highways, bridges and tunnels ”” the federal fuel tax, tolls or something else, such as public-private partnerships. The federal gas tax, 18.4 cents a gallon, has not been raised since 1993; more fuel-efficient vehicles have worsened the funding shortage.
Mayor Joe Riley was pleased the city he’s helmed since 1975 is now the No. 1 tourist destination in America.
“We love to share our extensive heritage and tradition of hospitality,” Riley said in a prepared statement. “It is thrilling to see that the visitors who come here not only enjoy what they see and experience, they also find an open welcome from the city. Great food and lovely hotels add much to the enjoyment of our guests who come either for a day or a week. We look forward to the opportunity to show visitors what makes Charleston a great place to visit.”
Voters annually evaluate cities based on six categories: atmosphere/ambience, culture/sites, friendliness, lodging, restaurants and shopping. The city with the highest composite appeal wins top honors.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will visit Zimbabwe in a show of support for Anglicans who are under siege from a renegade ex-bishop who plans to snub the leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Anglicans in Zimbabwe are embroiled in a church property fight with former Bishop Nolbert Kunonga of the capital of Harare. Kunonga left the church in 2007 over what he said was its pro-gay stance.
The crowding has become so severe that county officials acknowledge something must be done. They are discussing adding inpatient beds and transferring more patients to other hospitals, among other steps.
“A nine- or 10-hour wait is never a good thing,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, a Rand Corp. expert on emergency medicine. “At the least, it is demeaning, frustrating, uncomfortable, and when tempers flare, it can be dangerous.”
The debate over church use of city public-school space has been chugging through the courts since the mid-1990s. The Supreme Court has heard several high-profile cases on schools and religious life in recent years, but justices haven’t yet ruled on whether worship services should be allowed on school property.
That could make the Bronx church’s case a strong candidate for the docket, said Emily Gold Waldman, an associate professor of law at Pace Law School.
“The Supreme Court has decided a number of cases leading up to this issue,” Ms. Waldman said. “There’s still the open question of ‘what about pure religious worship?’ That’s what makes it different.”
Nearly a third of the nation’s cities are laying off workers this year. More than half have canceled or delayed infrastructure projects. And two out of five have raised their fees.
The catalog of service cuts and fee increases comes as America’s cities are bracing for what they expect will be their fifth straight year of declining revenues, according to a survey of city finance officers to be released on Tuesday by the National League of Cities.
One of the main culprits is the property tax, which many cities and local governments rely on heavily. Property tax collections, which are usually quite resilient, are projected to fall by 3.7 percent this year ”” their second year in a row of declines ”” as tax assessments belatedly catch up with the lower property values left behind by the battered real estate market. Sales tax collections are projected to be slightly higher this year, but income tax collections are projected to be slightly lower, as unemployment and lower wages take their toll in many places.
When the unemployment rate rose in most states last month, it underscored the extent to which the deep recession, the anemic recovery and the lingering crisis of joblessness are beginning to reshape the nation’s economic map.
The once-booming South, which entered the recession with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is now struggling with some of the highest rates, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Several Southern states ”” including South Carolina, whose 11.1 percent unemployment rate is the fourth highest in the nation ”” have higher unemployment rates than they did a year ago. Unemployment in the South is now higher than it is in the Northeast and the Midwest, which include Rust Belt states that were struggling even before the recession.
By air, land and sea – the nation’s largest counter-terrorism squad is on the beat in America’s largest city. One thousand officers – many of them armed like soldiers – are part of a presence that is meant to send a message: New York City is too tough a target. NYPD counter-terrorism is the creation of police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
Ray Kelly: We’re the number one target in this country. That’s the consensus of the intelligence community. We’re the communications capital. We’re the financial capital. We’re a city that’s been attacked twice successfully. We’ve had 13 terrorist plots against the city since September 11. No other city has had that.
Kelly is a classic cop. He started as an NYPD cadet and rose all the way to commissioner. He left the force before 9/11. But within four months of the attack, the mayor asked him to come back.
Christina Gustavsson says she loves school. But her teachers have had a tough time educating her.
In her freshman year at Kennett High School, 15-year-old Christina racked up five months’ worth of absences and never completed a full day of school. Sometimes, she had difficulty remembering assignments, completing homework or even waking up in time for school. Other times, she didn’t.
Christina has chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition whose symptoms have long confounded many medical professionals and now pose peculiar challenges for educators as more adolescents are diagnosed with it. In a time of tight budgets, public schools must consider how far to go to accommodate students with CFS and a range of so-called hidden disabilities that are difficult to observe, evaluate or understand.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has come under attack by some religious and political leaders for not including clergy members as speakers at Sunday’s official ceremony at ground zero on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview that the planned ceremony only proved that New York was the “epicenter of secularism,” out of step with the rest of America.
“We’re not France,” he said. “Mr. Bloomberg is pretending we’re a secular society, and we are not.”
Due to a total loss of power and heavy flooding the area, the Cranford Police Department has been evacuated. Police Chief Eric Mason, who is serving as the emergency management coordinator, was unavaiable to talk to the media regarding the evacuation.
Annual allegations of test-tampering and grade-changing by educators have more than tripled since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of New York City’s school system, outpacing a broader increase in complaints of adult misconduct in schools during the same period, according to the special commissioner of investigation.
The commissioner, Richard J. Condon, attributed the rise both to the expansion of the school system ”” its budget has more than doubled, to $24 billion from $11.5 billion when he took office in 2002, and the number of schools has grown to 1,700 from 1,200 ”” and to the higher stakes attached to standardized tests and classroom grades. The city’s performance bonuses, teacher evaluations, school progress reports and decisions on closings are all increasingly tied to student performance.
“When you start giving money to the schools to do well, that’s another incentive to appear to do well if you are not doing well,” said Mr. Condon, a plain-spoken former New York police commissioner. “If a lot of the evaluation is based on how the students do, that’s an incentive for the teachers to try to help the students do well, even in ways that are unacceptable.”
A mosque dispute in this Atlanta suburb is shining a spotlight on an antidiscrimination law increasingly pitting the Department of Justice against zoning officials across the country.
Lilburn’s city council plans to vote Tuesday whether to allow construction of a 20,000-square-foot Muslim worship center between a large Baptist church and a Hindu temple on a busy thoroughfare also lined with gas stations and strip malls.
The city council rejected zoning applications in 2009 and again last year for the center amid stiff opposition from some residents, who say the large mosque would bring too much traffic and noise and encroach on the neighborhood behind it.
Kathryn Meadowcroft said she knows what it’s like to live in a homeless shelter, and now she is worried that she might have to return there next month.
Three years ago she was able to move out of the shelter after several months and into an attractive, one-bedroom unit in Seven Farms Apartments, a low-income complex, on Daniel Island.
Her move was made possible because of a little-known federal subsidy that Lowcountry housing advocates tapped to help more local residents find a decent home.
However, on Aug. 31, the program — known as the Tenant Based Rental Assistance Program — will expire because of budget cuts.
(Here the founder of a Catholic Worker house describes their work in an area of stark inequalities[:])
It is the best of times and the worst of times in Oklahoma City. Our perception of how we are doing depends on where we are in the great economic scheme of things. If you are in the oil business, you are riding high. Driven by the strong prices for energy, Oklahoma’s oil sector is spending money lavishly, most notably on the new 50-floor skyscraper headquarters of Devon Energy in downtown Oklahoma City. The city is investing nearly $750 million over the next few years in its central core.
But this is a tale of two cities. Just a dozen blocks from the glamour of bio-engineering research institutes, I tried to get a health department inspector to condemn a rented house which had no heat, no electricity, no running water, no hot water, and in which the sewer was clogged. The tenant is a disabled man whose neighbours allow him to use their bathroom. The inspector called the landlord, but two months later there was still no hot water and the sewer was still blocked.
Local government officials are struggling to gauge the impact of the Standard & Poor’s unprecedented downgrade of federal credit even as Washington watches global reaction to its latest financial setback.
Will the ratings agency downgrade counties and states? Will the federal government’s predicament cost local taxpayers? And can local governments have better credit than the federal government?
“We are in uncharted territory,” Prince William County Board Chairman Corey A. Stewart (R) said. “No one knows what the ultimate long-term ramifications are. .”‰.”‰. But we know they’re going to be significant.”
Standard & Poor’s announced Friday night that it has downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time, dealing a symbolic blow to the world’s economic superpower in what was a sharply worded critique of the American political system.
Lowering the nation’s rating to one notch below AAA, the credit rating company said “political brinkmanship” in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances “less stable, less effective and less predictable.” It said the bipartisan agreement reached this week to find at least $2.1 trillion in budget savings “fell short” of what was necessary to tame the nation’s debt over time and predicted that leaders would not be likely to achieve more savings in the future.
“It’s always possible the rating will come back, but we don’t think it’s coming back anytime soon,” said David Beers, head of S&P’s government debt rating unit.
The federal government is expecting and preparing for bond rating agency Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the rating of U.S. debt from its current AAA value, a government official told ABC News.
Although the Obama administration is preparing for the possible downgrade, it is not 100 percent positive it is going to happen, a second government official said, and if it does happen officials are not sure when it will happen.
Two Charleston-based Coast Guard cutters helped in the recovery of 15,000 pounds of cocaine from a submarine-type craft in what’s believed to be the first time the stealth vessels increasingly favored by drug runners have been spotted in the Caribbean.
The Cutters Oak and Gallatin both took part in the effort to find and secure the wreck after the semi-submersible’s crew scuttled the boat in 75 feet of water near the Honduran-Nicaraguan border.
The crew of the Oak located the sunken vessel on the sea floor while the Gallatin participated in security and the overall effort, officials said.
“The current situation is dire, and necessitates decisive steps to put the city back on a path to solid financial footing and future prosperity,” Governor Lincoln Chafee, who joined Flanders in announcing the bankruptcy petition today, said in the statement. “We will be exploring all options to provide quality services at an affordable cost to all taxpayers.”
Central Falls, a city of about 18,000 located about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) north of Providence, is the fifth municipal entity to file for bankruptcy this year, compared with six in all of 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The filing followed last week’s move by lawmakers in Jefferson County, Alabama, to postpone a vote on proceeding with what would be the biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy.
Jewish groups in America have welcomed Thursday’s decision by a California Superior Court judge to remove a proposal aimed at banning circumcision from a San Francisco city ballot scheduled for November.
In response to the initiative, a number of Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco and the Anti-Defamation League, along with several individual plaintiffs ”“ both Jewish and Muslim ”“ filed a suit in June against the city, claiming that California state law prohibited municipal governments from restricting or regulating medical procedures.
Guests have included the homeless, pregnant and undocumented Tanzanian who showed up sobbing on the lawn of the sisters’ retreat center in Stamford, Conn., and later likened the care at Sacred Heart to “angels planting a root and watering it every day.” Then there was the Trinidadian nanny, six months pregnant with twins, whose boyfriend was trying to induce a miscarriage by kicking her down the stairs. There was the Polish immigrant who studied for the MCAT exam while living at the convent, as well as the former network journalist whose boyfriend split when she got a Down Syndrome diagnosis, and whose friends could not believe she’d throw herself so far “off-track” to have the child.
Another alumna had just finished a graduate program in England, gotten pregnant, been dumped by her law-student boyfriend and returned to the U.S. “in a horrible state of depression.” For an educated woman with professional ambitions, she said “an abortion seems like the most practical thing in the world. But once you do get pregnant, it’s not so easy.”
She had a daughter, got a magazine job and a subsidized apartment.
Judge Loretta M. Giorgi ordered San Francisco’s director of elections to strike the measure from the city’s ballot because she said that it is “expressly preempted” by the California Business and Professions Code.
Under that statute, only the state is allowed to regulate medical procedures, and “the evidence presented is overwhelmingly persuasive that circumcision is a widely practiced medical procedure,” the ruling said.
After a brief hearing, Giorgi also found that the proposed ban would violate citizens’ right to the free exercise of religion, said Deputy City Atty. Mollie Lee, because it targets Muslims and Jews, whose faiths call for circumcising males.
A firm defender of the Dallas Charter’s plicy of “zero tolerance” for clergy who have been credibility accused of abuse, he has shown himself to be a careful steward of the Church’s resources, successfully blocking a recent legislative effort to lift the statute of limitations for civil suits against the Church ”” but not for other groups.
Over the long haul, however, the new archbishop of Philadelphia will make his mark as a leader of the New Evangelization who is prepared to challenge the received wisdom of secular elites.
“Christianity is not mainly ”” or even significantly ”” about politics. It’s about living and sharing the love of God. And Christian political engagement, when it happens, is never mainly the task of the clergy. That work belongs to lay believers who live most intensely in the world,” he said, during a recent speech before a Baptist audience in Texas. “But a Christian life begins in a relationship with Jesus Christ, and it bears fruit in the justice, mercy and love we show to others because of that relationship.”
Jefferson County, Alabama, may decide this week on filing a record U.S. municipal bankruptcy, according to a meeting notice from the county commission.
The five-member commission meeting on July 28 may also vote on extending a negotiating period with creditors on restructuring more than $3 billion of sewer bonds or a settlement, the notice said.
The meeting will come one day before the end of a 30-day “standstill period” in which the county and creditors led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to pursue a settlement to end the more than three-year-old debt crisis.
The study linked these disciplinary actions to lower rates of graduation and higher rates of later criminal activity and found that minority students were more likely than whites to face the more severe punishments.
“In the last 20 to 25 years, there have been dramatic increases in the number of suspensions and expulsions,” said Michael Thompson, who headed the study as director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan group. “This quantifies how you’re in the minority if you have not been removed from the classroom at least once. This is not just being sent to the principal’s office, and it’s not after-school detention or weekend detention or extra homework. This is in the student’s record.”