City Council Meetings Research Articles

Urban Election System in Russia at End of 19th Century: Criticism in Provincial Periodicals

The article provides a first-time examination of the evaluations of the urban election system in the Russian Empire during the period of 1890-1892, when the preparation and implementation of the new City Regulations were taking place. The study is based on materials from private provincial periodicals. The author highlights the essence and content of the criticism of the provincial press towards the institution of urban elections. The article presents the attitudes towards the issue of social composition of urban self-government bodies as revealed in the periodical press. Positions on the issue of suffrage and proposals for its expansion through tax and educational qualifications are identified. The analysis includes assessments of the national composition of city councils and urban administrations on the outskirts and within Jewish settlements. It demonstrates how the formation of parties based on national identity in urban self-government bodies was covered in the periodicals. Discussions on the merger of powers between the heads of administrative and executive bodies of urban self-government are examined. Satirical poems, which characterize the recorded attitude towards council members and provincial assemblies in pre-revolutionary Russia, who dishonestly perform their duties and disrupt city council meetings, are introduced into scholarly circulation. Satire targeting corrupt intentions of council members is also discussed.

IMPLEMENTING GRIEF SERVICES FOR OLDER ADULTS: TRANSLATING SURVEY FINDINGS INTO TARGETED PROGRAMMING

Abstract This presentation will identify and describe the team’s ongoing efforts in actuating the Implementation phase of the EPIS Framework. Evidence-based strategies include formulating a multidisciplinary implementation team, organizing purveyor and intermediary support, and developing a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) plan. We will highlight the ways in which survey findings were disseminated to the general public and organizational leaders, such as presenting result summaries at city council meetings and in local newspaper articles. The challenges of negotiating survey findings into cohesive program implementation will be discussed, as well as management strategies towards age-related gaps in the implementation process that had not been identified previously. Recent program launches and the ways in which survey results directly informed their delivery will also be reviewed, namely, a free educational guest-speaker event for which over 700 community members attended and a grief-support holiday vigil hosted at a local long-term care facility. This presentation will also review considerations for the project’s next steps as it continues to hone its program delivery parameters and eventually enters into the last EPIS phase, Sustainment. Specific foci will include deciding the long-term methods of quality assurance evaluation and program adaptations to revolving community bereavement needs.

Government versus the people – The mismatch in value use to assess solar farms in the Netherlands

In energy projects, especially in controversial ones, two trajectories of assessment can be distinguished: a formal trajectory, embedded in the legal system, and an informal trajectory, residing in the public discourse. Often, there is a fundamental mismatch between these two trajectories. The informal trajectory arises because local residents perceive certain shortcomings in values used to assess the project in the formal trajectory. In this paper, we investigate the role values play in the assessments of eight utility-scale solar farms in two municipalities in the Netherlands. Based on policy documents, transcripts of city council meetings and newspaper articles, we identify seven values that play an important role in the assessment of solar farms. In order of their occurrence: Prudent land use, Procedural justice, Minimized observable impact on surroundings, Legality, Sustainability, Financial distributive justice and Innovation. Of these, Legality and Sustainability are most used as arguments in favor of solar farms (mostly in the formal trajectory), whereas Procedural justice, Prudent land use and Minimized impact on surroundings are most used in arguments against solar farms (in both trajectories). Our empirical results indicate that a solar farm is more likely to be controversial when only a minimal formal evaluation framework is in place. Based on our results, we recommend policymakers to develop comprehensive evaluation frameworks for energy projects, as well as to organize a multitude of interaction opportunities between the formal and informal trajectory. In this way, the interaction between the two trajectories can lead to better-quality and better-supported decisions on energy projects.

Mayoral Control and School Superintendents: Lessons from Japan

Background/Context: Since the early 1990s, the United States has been witnessing reforms in large, high-visibility cities, with mayors granted the power to appoint school boards, superintendents, or both. This shift away from elected school board governance has been characterized as marginalizing traditional educators and ushering in reforms that traditional educators oppose. On the other hand, Japan’s experience with mayoral control of schools is nationwide and longer-lived. In 1956, mayors were given authority to appoint members of the school board, and in 2015 they were given further authority to appoint school superintendents. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study analyzes whether Japanese mayors appoint superintendents whose backgrounds make them likely to challenge the education establishment and introduce dramatic educational reforms. We provide some early evidence on how mayors have been using their new powers and how they interact with the superintendents they select. Research Design: We used data from nationwide surveys conducted by the Japanese government to map the broad pattern of superintendent characteristics over time as well as for a sampling framework to identify and select a smaller number of superintendents to be interviewed for obtaining in-depth information. Semistructured interviews of six superintendents were conducted to delve more deeply into the relationship between mayors and superintendents, and the communication between the superintendents and the school board members in Japan. To triangulate the interview data, transcripts of school board meetings, city council meetings, election bulletins (official campaign manifestos), demographic data, and national test scores of students were collected from 2015 to 2019. Conclusions/Recommendations: We identified important differences between the United States and Japan. Rather than aligning with the reform-oriented mayors against school boards and education bureaucracies, the Japanese mayor-appointed superintendents act as mediators between the mayors and the school boards. The difference may be that, in the United States, only mayors who sought mayoral control had the right to appoint school superintendents, whereas in Japan the national government gave all mayors the right to appoint superintendents, regardless of the political context.

The Private Investigator

The Private Investigator

Fungible Citizenship

Fungible Citizenship

Municipal institutions and local policy responses to immigrants: policies towards day labourers in California

ABSTRACT This paper examines the various factors that influence how local elected officials (mayors and council persons) in the United States develop policy responses to immigrant day labourers in their jurisdictions. We argue that in addition to demographic and political factors, the design of municipal political institutions shapes their responses. Inclusive day labourer policies are more likely to occur in mayor–council systems than in council–manager systems. In addition, we argue that it is important to consider how the interaction of factors affects local policy responses. Several factors have been identified as impacting local immigration policies, but in order to understand the widespread variation in local policy responses, it is necessary to examine how these factors interact in particular localities over extended periods of time. Interaction leads to dynamic policies that change over time. Local policy responses are examined quantitatively – using a dataset based on day labourer hiring sites in California and fitting multilevel generalized linear models – and qualitatively – using transcribed city council meetings.

Weakening the Strong Mayor: Partisan Division and Presidential Intervention in Istanbul

Istanbul, the leading city of Turkey, is a good case for analyzing the conflictual relations of the mayor with the city council and the central government. Istanbul had been governed by the mayors from the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) and its predecessor parties since 1994. In the local elections held in March 2019, which was repeated only for Istanbul after two months with a highly suspicious decision by the Supreme Election Board, the AKP lost this city. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, has harsh relations with the city council, which is dominated by the AKP and its alliance party, the Nationalist Movement Party ( Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi; MHP). What exacerbates this situation is the partisan intervention of the increasingly authoritarian central government that weakens the mayor's position. The mayor tries to counterbalance the power of the city council and central government agencies through livestreaming the city council meetings and attracting civic engagement on his side. This article is expected to contribute to the literature on mayoral leadership, partisan constraints to mayoral powers as well as the mayor's strategies against the authoritarian intervention of the central governments. Mayor İmamoğlu's strategies and measures adopted for overcoming the efforts of blocking his agenda by both the council and central government might inspire other mayors experiencing similar partisan constraints.

A community-engaged approach to understanding environmental health concerns and solutions in urban and rural communities

BackgroundFocus groups and workshops can be used to gain insights into the persistence of and potential solutions for environmental health priorities in underserved areas. The objective of this study was to characterize focus group and workshop outcomes of a community-academic partnership focused on addressing environmental health priorities in an urban and a rural location in Alabama between 2012 and 2019.MethodsSix focus groups were conducted in 2016 with 60 participants from the City of Birmingham (urban) and 51 participants from Wilcox County (rural), Alabama to discuss solutions for identified environmental health priorities based on previous focus group results in 2012. Recorded focus groups were transcribed and analyzed using the grounded theory approach. Four follow-up workshops that included written survey instruments were conducted to further explore identified priorities and determine whether the priorities change over time in the same urban (68 participants) and rural (72 participants) locations in 2018 and 2019.ResultsConsistent with focus groups in 2012, all six focus groups in 2016 in Birmingham identified abandoned houses as the primary environmental priority. Four groups listed attending city council meetings, contacting government agencies and reporting issues as individual-level solutions. Identified city-level solutions included city-led confiscation, tearing down and transferring of abandoned property ownership. In Wilcox County, all six groups agreed the top priority was drinking water quality, consistent with results in 2012. While the priority was different in Birmingham versus Wilcox County, the top identified reason for problem persistence was similar, namely unresponsive authorities. Additionally, individual-level solutions identified by Wilcox County focus groups were similar to Birmingham, including contacting and pressuring agencies and developing petitions and protesting to raise awareness, while local policy-level solutions identified in Wilcox County included government-led provision of grants to improve septic systems, and transparency in allocation of funds. Workshops in 2018 and 2019 further emphasized water quality as the top priority in Wilcox County, while participants in Birmingham transitioned from abandoned houses as a top priority in 2018 to drinking water quality as a new priority in 2019.ConclusionsApplying a community-engaged approach in both urban and rural locations provided better understanding of the unique opportunities and challenges for identifying potential interventions for environmental health priorities in both locations. Results can help inform future efforts to address locally defined environmental health issues and solutions.

The Interlocking Processes Constraining the Struggle for Sanctuary in the Trump Era: The Case of La Puente, CA

By 10 January 2017, activists in the predominately Latina/o working class city of La Puente, California had lobbied the council to declare the city a sanctuary supporting immigrants, people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. The same community members urged the school district to declare itself a sanctuary. While community members rejoiced in pushing elected officials to pass these inclusive resolutions, there were multiple roadblocks reducing the potential for more substantive change. Drawing on city council and school board meetings, resolutions and my own involvement in this sanctuary struggle, I focus on a continuum of three overlapping and interlocking manifestations of white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy: neoliberal diversity discourses, institutionalized policies, and a re-emergence of high-profiled white supremacist activities. Together, these dynamics minimized, contained and absorbed community activism and possibilities of change. They reinforced the status quo by maintaining limits on who belongs and sustaining intersecting hierarchies of race, immigration status, gender, and sexuality. This extended case adds to the scant scholarship on the current sanctuary struggles, including among immigration scholars. It also illustrates how the state co-opts and marginalizes movement language, ideas, and people, providing a cautionary tale about the forces that restrict more transformative change.

Place‐based Identity and Framing in Local Environmental Politics

AbstractFraming has long been a central construct in scholarship on the role of rhetoric and discourse in the policy process. Research on policy framing and identity thus far has neglected the role of place‐based identity, focusing instead on identity constructs such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Through a mixed methods analysis of transcripts of City Council meetings in Philadelphia from 2007 to 2017, we analyze how policy makers, local interest groups, and national/regional interest groups employ place‐based framing to define, explain, and propose solutions to environmental problems. We contrast local place‐based frames with more abstract global frames that center arguments for policy change on the national or global implications of environmental problems. Our results reveal that place‐based framing is a dominant mode of discourse in Philadelphia environmental policy discussions and that actors may employ frames strategically so as to appeal to place‐based identities and to further political goals.

Does Property Ownership Lead to Participation in Local Politics? Evidence from Property Records and Meeting Minutes

Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to participate in local politics? I combine deed-level property records in California and Texas with an original dataset on individual comments in local city council meetings to study the role of property ownership in shaping costly forms of political behavior, and I document large inequalities in who participates at city council meetings. I also link property records to individual-level contribution records and administrative voter files and find that becoming a property owner increases an individual’s political activity. Over and above voting in local elections, property ownership motivates individuals to participate in local city council meetings and donate to candidates. These findings illustrate how the experience of homeownership leads property owners to become much more active in local politics.

Everyday Advocacy: No Librarian Is An Island: Volunteers Are Your Best Untapped Advocates

When we think of advocacy, we often think of what we, as individuals, could be doing. Am I speaking up enough for the library? How’s my elevator pitch? Am I attending city council meetings, back-to-school nights, farmers’ markets? Am I doing everything I can to make sure that my community knows all the wonderful things the library has to offer?

"Did I see what I really saw?" Violence, percepticide, and dangerous seeing after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid.

We use a violence framework to describe an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid, and the subsequent cultural and structural violence that played out in one community after the raid. First, we focus on testimonies given about the ICE raids at two city council meetings, compared with how the raids were characterized in the local paper. We document cultural and structural violence in the newspaper reporting, through ideology and narratives (as forms of cultural violence) and percepticide (as a form of structural violence). We then analyze the process undertaken by 9-12-year-old youth researchers to construct a problem definition, and the script they wrote to explain the problem. We describe the "dangerous seeing" they engaged in to decode fictions about violence and create a rupture for solidarity and social action. Finally, we examine how elementary school leadership responded to these youth. Through fieldnotes, we document the cultural violence (via the control of public space) and structural violence (via percepticide and the obscuring of the social origins of social problems) perpetrated by school leadership.

Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others Are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life. By Jay Wexler

In this book, law professor and humorist Jay Wexler argues that the Supreme Court has moved toward a looser understanding of the separation of church and state, now cemented with the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh; and that, in response, religious minorities have increasingly come forward demanding their place alongside the Christian majority in the public square through such activities as requesting to give prayer invocations before city council meetings, attempting to place religious monuments on government property, receiving school vouchers and other forms of federal money, and organizing religious clubs that meet in public schools. Wexler’s primary purpose is simply to explain and explore this wave of public activity from minority religions. To research this book, he travelled the country and conducted participant observation with Muslims, Pagans, Satanists, and even Summum, a little-known new religious movement based in Salt Lake City. Wexler notes that when these minority religions claim the same rights as Christians, the response from the religious majority has frequently been “distressingly hostile, ignorant, and hateful” (8). In several cases, government bodies decided to close open forums to religion entirely rather than allow Satanists or other maligned religions to participate. Wexler concludes that as the Supreme Court loosens its interpretation of the Establishment Clause, it is now more important than ever for religious minorities to demand equal footing with Christians. He writes, “Only by insisting on exercising these rights can Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, and everybody else ensure that the Court’s new religious jurisprudence does not result in a public space occupied exclusively by Christian messages and symbols. At stake is nothing less than our national public life” (10).

Urban approaches to human rights: tracking networks of engagement in Amsterdam’s debate on irregular migration

This paper discusses local engagements with human rights norms in Amsterdam, in the context of responses to irregular migration. Specifically, the article studies the local government’s development of a human rights agenda and reflects how this aligns with or contradicts (1) the local government’s program for irregular migrants and (2) NGO initiatives in the realm of human rights and irregular migrants. In 2016 the municipality of Amsterdam launched an “Amsterdam Human Rights Agenda” and (irregular) migration is not mentioned, while the local government does have a progressive program for irregular migrants. Simultaneously, several NGOs contest the municipality for their approach towards irregular migrants, at times using human rights language. Analysis of stakeholder interviews, city council meetings and policy documents reveal the conflicting approaches that urban actors have towards human rights. The language of rights gives weight to claims of NGOs, precisely because of its legal dimension. Contrastingly, in the human rights agenda the municipality mainly refers to rights in their moral sense and refrains from legal language. Concrete issues that are already on the political agenda become labelled as human rights problems. Therefore, this article deliberates whether this undermines the possible strength of human rights as an urban governance framework.

Trust as an ethical value in emerging technology governance: The case of drone regulation

We build on discussions of ethical values for the good society by foregrounding the potential role of emerging technologies in realizing the good society. Specifically, we look at the emergence of drones and the evolving regulation of their ownership and use. We present a qualitative, thematic analysis of city council meetings in 20 cities in southern California where drone regulation was discussed from 2014 to 2017. These results show the ethical themes that were operative in such discussions: privacy, safety, enforceability, crime, nuisance and professionality. Underlying most of these themes is trust. We discuss this concept with respect to the good society, and we suggest that trust may be more critical to emerging technologies than technologies in general. That is, trust in an emerging technology is required for it to be accepted and more fully integrated in society. Without trust, it is difficult for society to accept the technology.

"I'm an Artist and I'm Sensitive About My City": Black Women Artivists Confronting Resegregation in Sacramento

"I'm an Artist and I'm Sensitive About My City":Black Women Artivists Confronting Resegregation in Sacramento Jeanelle Hope (bio) Sac girl, Black girl You rock, girl And when you make it to the top Don't stop girl Takarra "Kari Jay" Johnson Every Wednesday, Queen Sheba, a Black women-owned and -operated Ethiopian restaurant, hosts the Mahogany Urban Poetry Series in collaboration with local Black artists and organizers. Centrally located less than a mile away from the historically Black neighborhood, Oak Park, and easily accessible to the gentrifying Midtown and Downtown Sacramento neighborhoods, the restaurant has become a hot spot among the influx of new residents. For Black Sacramentans, however, the restaurant is a resilient staple that survived the 2008 financial crash as well as the rapid post-Recession redevelopment that is displacing many of the city's Black residents and businesses to make room for former San Francisco Bay Area residents and the vulturous industries trailing them.1 While economic refugees from the Bay Area can no longer afford the coastal rents that have spiked over the past ten years in response to the tech/ start-up boom, rent in Sacramento is relatively affordable with their slightly higher incomes. Therefore, to Black Sacramentans fighting to stay in the city, Queen Sheba, while best known for its food, is also highly regarded as a key holding space for an embattled and disappearing community. [End Page 59] In May of 2016, I attended my first Mahogany Open Mic Night where Takarra "Kari Jay" Johnson—Sacramento native, student, former Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) poet-mentor educator, and artivist—was the featured artist of the night. I arrived a few hours early for dinner, and as the event drew near, I watched the space transform. Chairs were lined up near a makeshift stage. One of the organizers stood near the door and began collecting a five-dollar cover charge from attendees, and nearly all of the non-Black diners began leaving after they finished their meals. Queen Sheba shifted from a restaurant where patrons could "get down and 'indigenous' with their food," as described recently by a Yelp reviewer, to a community space that nurtured and showcased the work of local Black artists. About an hour into the event, Johnson took the stage and began performing the aforementioned poem, "Sac Girl, Black Girl. . . ." She kept the crowd engaged with her cadence, style, and words that evoked memories of a seemingly distant Black Sacramento. Throughout the night, several Black women took the mic using the space for therapy, to bring attention to local inequities and injustices, and to joyously remember the narratives and spaces of "Black Sac."2 Sitting in Queen Sheba, it is hard to believe that Sacramento—a city that has long stood in the shadow of the San Francisco Bay Area—made the news for being the city with the fastest rising rents in the nation.3 Over the past five years, the city has seen a surge in redevelopment as investors and developers look for the next real estate gold rush. In response, Sacramento residents have taken to the streets and city council meetings to voice their frustrations, organizing a tenants' union, transit riders' union, a community land trust and launching grassroots campaigns to help elect populist public officials.4 Similar to other rapidly gentrifying cities like Oakland, Detroit, and Nashville, longstanding community members are not leaving without a fight. And beyond traditional forms of organizing, local Black activists are using art as a means to draw attention to this crisis—artivism. Black women artivists in Sacramento have been using art and culture as a means to educate residents about the history of Black Sacramento; to solidify the history and memory of Black Sacramento through murals, public art exhibits, and other art-based community events; to promote community organizing and activism; and to insert Black Sacramento into the larger historical narrative of Blacks in the West. This article first examines the history of resegregation in Sacramento and its impact on the city's Black citizenry.5 Second, it highlights how Black women visual and performance artivists and Black women business owners are entangled in this iteration of...

Race and Legislative Responsiveness in City Council Meetings

Legislative responsiveness under description representation, even at the local level, is often conceptualized as how elites act on or comply with the requests or preferences of minority constituents. In this article, I look at and evaluate a neglected but important dimension of responsiveness. Specifically, I investigate the impact of race on the verbal responses that legislators provide to constituents who speak at local public meetings. Through an analysis of data collected from city council minutes and direct observations of council meetings, I find a lack of evidence for the independent effect of race on legislative responsiveness in these meetings. However, I do find that the impact of race is conditional on the statements expressed by constituents.

300 years of hydrological records and societal responses to droughts and floods on the Pacific coast of Central America

Abstract. The management of hydrological extremes and impacts on society is inadequately understood because of the combination of short-term hydrological records, an equally short-term assessment of societal responses and the complex multi-directional relationships between the two over longer timescales. Rainfall seasonality and inter-annual variability on the Pacific coast of Central America is high due to the passage of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Here we reconstruct hydrological variability and demonstrate the potential for assessing societal impacts by drawing on documentary sources from the cities of Santiago de Guatemala (now Antigua Guatemala) and Guatemala de la Asunción (now Guatemala City) over the period from 1640 to 1945. City and municipal council meetings provide a rich source of information dating back to the beginning of Spanish colonisation in the 16th century. We use almost continuous sources from 1640 AD onwards, including > 190 volumes of Actas de Cabildo and Actas Municipales (minutes of meetings of the city and municipal councils) held by the Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Antigua Guatemala (AHMAG) and the Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) in Guatemala City. For this 305-year period (with the exception of a total of 11 years during which the books were either missing or damaged), information relating to Catholic rogation ceremonies and reports of flooding events and crop shortages were used to classify the annual rainy season (May to October) on a five-point scale from very wet to very dry. In total, 12 years of very wet conditions, 25 years of wetter than usual conditions, 34 years of drier conditions and 21 years of very dry conditions were recorded. An extended drier period from the 1640s to the 1740s was identified and two shorter periods (the 1820s and the 1840s) were dominated by dry conditions. Wetter conditions dominated the 1760s–1810s and possibly record more persistent La Niña conditions that are typically associated with higher precipitation over the Pacific coast of Central America. The 1640s–1740s dry period coincides with the Little Ice Age and the associated southward displacement of the ITCZ.