#municipal-governance

#municipal-governance

Early results show that the far-right candidate Louis Aliot has held the town of Perpignan with 51.4 percent of the vote, while the centre-right mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart has also been re-elected with 59.5 percent. In the town of Vernon in the greater Paris region, mayor Francois Ouzilleau - a close ally of prime minister Sebastien Lecornu - was also re-elected in the first round.

Local officials say they need approximately $7.8 million to cover policing, fire protection, equipment, and other public safety obligations during the tournament. That money was expected to come from federal funding approved last year as part of a broader security package tied to the World Cup and other national events. But the funding has not arrived.

The three charter reform measures Lurie and Mandelman have proposed are 1) giving the mayor powers currently held by independent City Hall commissions, 2) making it harder to put ballot measures on San Francisco election ballots, and 3) making the City Administrator's term ten years instead of five years, and giving the Administrator more authority over contracts.

Six weeks into his tenure, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been confronted with controversies both grave and frivolous. He wisely stood by a top appointee who was facing down a media circus for tweets that were more than a half-decade old. He grappled with the fallout from several police-involved shootings and navigated how, as a democratic socialist who must partner with a much more conservative NYPD commissioner, he should respond.

"Closer to the nation's capital, however, people have been muttering "abolish ice." The denizens of the Acela Corridor aren't without their own misgivings about assertive immigration enforcement. But even the most hardened member of the Resistance-frozen solid-has to wonder why it takes two weeks after a moderate snowstorm for a Democratic-controlled city to plow a street or clear a sidewalk."

A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings.

Birmingham, once celebrated for its municipal governance, now faces a crisis rooted in political dysfunction exacerbated by refuse workers' strikes and poor administrative decisions.