By Neal Peirce For Release Sunday, June 28, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — For at least a half century, “silos” and borders have been tripping up effective governance in America.
The silos loom highest at the federal level, where massive departments from Transportation to Commerce to Labor rarely speak and almost never work together.
Borders proliferate closer to home, dividing our metro areas into hundreds of economically linked but separately governed cities and suburbs. And borders, as state lines, plunge straight through such massive citistate regions as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis.
But the Obama era is bringing glimmers of hope for change.
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By Mary Newsom For Release Thursday, June 25, 2009
Citiwire.net
Maybe somewhere in Obama-land, stimulus money is protecting public school classrooms. But here in the red clay of North Carolina, there’s a teacher layoff bloodbath going on.
A few days after I heard that the toughest and best history teacher at our daughter’s high school got the ax–one of hundreds of teacher layoffs in Charlotte’s public schools and thousands in $5 billion-in-the-red North Carolina–I listened to Charlotte’s airport manager describe a $300-million parking deck he’s planning, complete with pedestrian tunnel. It’s in a package of projects: a new international concourse, two new hourly parking decks, an expanded ticketing area, a new runway–all to be funded by bond sales, the debt paid with airport revenues. “We’re spending money like drunken sailors,” the manager recently told a Charlotte Chamber of Commerce group.
This is madness.
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