With limited fiscal capabilities, effective and efficient budgeting is a necessity for local governments in the United States. Acknowledging the critical (but often overlooked) part that raising enough revenue to fund desirable and mandatory programs plays in the budgetary process, this book offers an exclusive and comprehensive examination of the revenue side of the budget. It provides much-needed and wide-ranging context for examining and understanding local government revenues and local government revenue policy. Author J. Edwin Benton presents a comprehensive overview of the revenue structure for local governments, in general, and for counties, municipalities, townships, special districts, and school districts, in particular. The bulk of this book meticulously examines the historical patterns and trends in revenue usage by local governments and provides explanations for variations among different units of government, states, and regions of the country. This book enhances our understanding of the most relevant research and aids in refining theories that seek to explain why local governments (or different types of local governments) rely more on certain kinds of revenues. It also offers immediately applicable real-world case studies on revenue-raising capabilities, practicalities, and experiences of local governments around the country. It will be of enormous interest to public budgeting practitioners, students, and scholars.

The unprecedented double blow of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing steep recession challenges local governments in profound ways, from managing public health responses, ensuring the safety of workers, and balancing budgets in the midst of extreme uncertainty. How are local governments in the U.S. navigating these turbulent times? What impacts on revenues and services are they seeing? How does all of this impact their relationships with federal and state levels of government? Through in-depth interviews with thirty top local leaders (mayors or city/county managers), this article provides an insightful snapshot that begins to answer these questions.

The American democratic system of government is being put to its greatest test since the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, as the country endeavors to cope with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. That is, considerable pressure continues to build up at the fault lines of governance inherent in the country's unique federal form of government which explicitly and implicitly expects national, state, and local levels to work together while they also may function as separate, autonomous entities to promote and provide for the general welfare. These fault lines exist where governance and service provision matters necessitate the collective attention and action of two or more levels of government. Both cooperation and conflict are possible interactive outcomes in these situations. This article provides an early assessment of how national, state, and local governments have worked together since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently a "report card" of sorts on the functioning of intergovernmental relations in the U.S. at the present time. More specifically, the article will examine the current condition of interstate, interlocal, state-local, and national-state relations. While the findings and observations reported here are certainly enlightening, they should be viewed as preliminary. Followed up research should be conducted to determine if there have been any policy learning has occurred and if such information has been used in improve the quality of governance in keeping with citizen expectations of American federalism.

Change at the local level of government is constant. Local governments are buffeted by forces ranging from the decisions of other governments to the demands of their citizens. They must respond to the routine exigencies of daily life and to the shocks of systemic upheaval, all the while under the gaze of local press and people. To accommodate these situations, local governments must modify the scope and modalities of their services, as well as their agencies and operations, with some frequency. It is the cause and effects of this rejiggering and reconfiguring of services, which is the topic of this issue of the State and Local Government Review’s (SLGR) Governance Matters (GM) section.

The purpose of this article is to lay a foundation for a better understanding of the nature of local government collaboration, the rationale for and pros and cons of entering into them, the considerations and issues that accompany these kinds of arrangements, and their prospects for success. Taking a closer look at local governments collaborative is particularly timely and relevant, given the lingering anguish associated with the great recession and the prospect for local governments having to adapt to the exigencies and challenges of providing services in what many in academia and government are projecting to be the new normal. While the five articles that follow will address many of the topics highlighted previously and hopefully provide more informed answers than lingering questions, additional, follow-up research and the development of best case scenarios will be both welcomed and warranted.

To set the tone for the Special Issue, this article focuses on understanding the total impact of the Great Recession on local governments, predicting whether these impacts will be permanent, and providing explanations for the changes that these governments have made and prescriptions of how to address them and whether it constitutes a “New Normal.” This opening article first reviews the articles in the Special Issue that examine various facets of the “New Normal.” To add substance to this context, data from a recent survey of county and cities are presented and provide timely and useful information on these government’s recovery strategies, patterns of behavior, and responses to the their changed situation brought on by the recession. Finally, this article closes with a consideration of the data against the framework and a call for further research while looking at what these strategies imply about research on new governance arrangements for local governments.

Journal Article The Practice of Fiscal Federalism: Comparative Perspectives , edited by Anwar Shah. Get access The Practice of Fiscal Federalism: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Anwar Shah. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, 438 pp., $32.95 paperback. J. Edwin Benton J. Edwin Benton University of South Florida jbenton@cas.usf.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Volume 40, Issue 4, Fall 2010, Pages 719–721, https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjq002 Published: 01 March 2010

The American county?long consid ered to be the bedrock of local gov ernment in the United States?has grown in importance since the middle of the 20th century. Between 1962 and 2002, the county government share of county and municipal revenues grew from 39.3 to 47.3 percent, and expenditures grew from 33.7 to 46.5 percent. As a consequence of this substantial growth in county financial activity, there has been a con comitant and stunning increase in the types and level of county government services. Re latedly, the county workforce has increased dramatically, more than tripling in size from around 700,000 full-time equivalent employ ees in 1962 to 2.3 million in 2002. In 2002, county employees accounted for 48.6 per cent of the county and municipal workforce compared with 35.7 percent in 1962. Today, counties employ almost as many people as do municipalities. Coincident with this growth, American counties face a number of challenges as ser vice-delivery agents and instruments of gov ernance in the early 21st century. Viewed from a global perspective, perhaps the most daunting challenge is whether or not coun ties can meet the myriad and far-flung expec tations that accompany the service roles coun ties are expected to play. A growing number of county governments must simultaneously function as traditional, local, and regional governments (see Benton 2002a). As tradi tional governments, counties serve as ad ministrative or political arms of their state governments and thus perform a number of state functions (many of them mandated) and services to all county residents.1 When counties function as local governments, they provide municipal-type services to residents of unincorporated areas.2 In addition, densely populated counties often serve as regional governments when they provide urban-type services to residents of both unincorporated and incorporated areas.3 This enlargement of the service role and prominence of counties and the wholly new approach to daily operations that is required means that county governments must deal with several governance issues. Indeed, these issues are part and parcel of the very essence of counties as they strive to provide tradi tional as well as municipaland urban-type services and meet the heightened expecta tions of democratic governance. As function ing full-service governments, three questions in particular are salient. First, what is the most suitable form of county government in terms of responsiveness to escalating service expectations and ability to negotiate with

Given local, regional, national, and global events of the last few years and the ever‐increasing service roles and expectations of county governments, American counties warrant greater scholarly attention. To guide researchers, the research agenda published in this journal 15 years ago has been refined and expanded. This 11‐point agenda includes fiscal capacity and responsibility; the role of structure, politics, and political participation; intergovernmental relations and networking; professionalism; service delivery; environmental issues; population changes; managing conflict and promoting integration; terrorism and security; information technology; and economic development. In addition, five database concerns and needs that pose significant challenges to researchers are identified and presented for consideration.

Journal Article George W. Bush's Federal Aid Legacy Get access J. Edwin Benton J. Edwin Benton **University of South Florida jbenton@cas.usf.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Volume 37, Issue 3, Summer 2007, Pages 371–389, https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjm010 Published: 29 May 2007

Revenue, expenditure, and employment data indicate that county governments—once taken for granted and playing “second fiddle” to municipalities—are playing an increasingly important role (and sometimes a role equal to that of municipalities) as vital service providers. Therefore, one would expect that county governments and municipal governments would receive approximately equal treatment in college and university graduate and undergraduate local government courses. However, a recent survey of college and university faculty who regularly teach local government courses reveals that this is not the case. Moreover, a content analysis of local government textbooks indicates that they are skewed in favor of municipalities. This article reports other findings from this survey that shed light on the reasons for this unequal treatment in the local government classroom and offers suggestions for changing the unbalanced approach to teaching these courses.