James M. Banovetz – författare

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Replacing the Police Chief describes the dilemma of a manager whose attempt to administer in accordance with the tenets of professionalism runs into strong opposition from a politically influential family. This e-book also shows council-manager government in action, facing one of the most severe tests that can confront this form of government, and describes precisely how council-manager government works at its best, making it the most commonly used form of government in all but the nation's smallest and very largest cities, and in a growing number of counties as well.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Developing A Purchasing System demonstrates how ambivalent local officials and the public can be in their expectations regarding government. In this e-book, the professional administrator must learn to live with that ambiguity even while attempting to promote professional values that emphasize efficiency and effectiveness in the conduct of public business.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Unknown Taxpayer Preferences demonstrates the most common and difficult of contradictory public interest demands: the public's strong, unambiguous demand for lower taxes, which has persisted together with the public's continuing demand for more spending for favorite programs. This e-book demonstrates the need for local goverment staff to stay out of local politics, but that option is not available in this case. The politics involved are not the politics of election campaigns; they are the politics of budgeting.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Patronage shows the impact of competing values on one community's attempt to modernize its governmental structure so that its operations can be made more efficient, with immediate budgetary savings. This e-book also highlights another reality of contemporary politics: the citizens who take an active role in a political issue are those with a personal stake in the outcome.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Politics, User Fees, and Barracudas looks at local politics from the perspective of a citizen who, in his capacity as an officer of a local swim team, attempts to negotiate a fee agreement with the city that will enable the team to use a city swimming pool for its practice sessions. What starts as a disagreement over fees becomes a disagreement over administrative methods as well. This e-book also provides an instructive look at government administration from the perspective of the citizen.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Redeveloping the Waterfront discusses the challenges public administrators face when they get involved with economic development, which leads to simultaneously working in both the public and private sectors. Chief among those challenges is the need to navigate between the sometimes conflicting operating practices of the two sectors, including the need to reconcile the open, public information requirements of the public sector with the closed, confidential requirements of the private sector. This is the challenge that confronted public administrators in the village of Crystal Lake.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Goodbye, Sampson, Inc.? portrays the critical link between economic development policies and local neighborhoods. In this instance, the proposed development would help revitalize the city's central business district but would also affect adjacent residential neighborhoods, with their aging housing stock and diverse racial and socioeconomic makeup. This e-book also highlights the classic problems of social and land use planning.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Providing A Municipal Ambulance Service demonstrates that the task of policy analysis clearly requires much more than simply "e;processing the numbers"e; to find the best-case, most efficient, or even least-cost solution to a problem. This e-book also demonstrates the conflicts between professional public administration's two main principles: responsiveness (to the citizens being served) and efficiency (in the provision of public services).

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Contracting for Trash poses an analytical problem that will face most if not all county and city governments: how to find the best (i.e., the most cost-efficient and effective) system for collecting residential trash. This e-book also examines a service delivery option that local governments are considering with increasing frequency: contracting with a private firm to provide a public service-in this case, the collection of the city's residential trash.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Moving the Multiservice Center discusses how where the county should relocate one of its multiservice centers pits political considerations against analytical (empirical) ones and, in the process, poses the ultimate ethical dilemma for an analyst. This e-book probes a contemporary question of democratic theory: How should the results of empirical policy analysis, fashioned to maximize public values regarding cost and service effectiveness in the long term, be reconciled with the policy preferences of elected officials who, although their vision may be focused on short-run political considerations, still have ultimate responsibility for policy decisions?

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Personnel or People? calls for a decision about the treatment of a fire chief who is discovered to be appropriating city property for personal use. Ultimately, this e-book poses a complex question for the administrator: should the case be handled "e;by the book,' or should established rules be sacrificed in favor of more sensitive and humane treatment?

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Affirmatively Managing Helen focuses on the challenge to administrative leadership to secure maximum benefit from a nonproductive but competent employee who has the potential to make important contributions to her department. The management challenge in the case involves more than just managing affirmative action efforts; it involves educating other employees--in this case, men--who must learn to work with the woman and abandon sexist patterns of behavior.This e-book highlights a multiplicity of issues in organizational theory and human resource management.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Cedar Valley Slowdown describes the plight of the city administration in Cedar Valley as it attempts to respond to ill-timed wage demands, first from its police officers and then from its firefighters. The e-book has all the elements of a typical local government labor relations controversy: substantial employee demands, tight budgets and taxpayer resistance to tax hikes, lack of experience on both sides of the negotiations, and reluctance on the part of the city to negotiate with employee organizations.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: The Human Side of Privatization describes the question of privatization by looking at both the economic and the human consequences of privatization and by raising questions about the tradeoffs that accompany privatization efforts. In this e-book, the issues of social justice, public policy ethics, and administrative responsibilities are raised in a new and vitally important context.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Redesigning the Budget process describes the challenge of developing a budget process that meets both administrative and legislative expectations produces tensions that underscore the policy importance of the budgetary process. This e-book highlights how the administrator's influence in the government is shaped by two budgetary functions: the process of budget preparation and the process of budget implementation.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Welcome to the New Town Manager? highlights that budget planning and preparation in local government is policymaking. This eBook also describes every manager's worst nightmare: an apparently healthy and tranquil government suddenly thrown into crisis conditions with a plethora of hard choices to be made and little time to make them.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: County Prison Overtime discusses a classic example of the difficulties of budget implementation and sets the stage for continuing dialogue, and sometimes confrontation, between the budget office and line departments. This eBook also provides a glimpse into a little-known and less-understood public service function: the management of a county correctional facility.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Principles under Pressure focuses on how a local administrator should handle a situation when external circumstances make it impossible to avoid politics. The manager's failure to get involved could undermine the integrity of the council-manager form of government as practiced in the community and probably cost the manager his job as well. This e-book also features the ICMA Code of Ethics as a guideline for decision making.

Managing Local Government: Cases in Decision Making: Fire or Be Fired demonstrates the level of complexity that can confront public administrators and presents a challenge found in both private and public sectors and at all levels of organizational responsibility: what to do when your boss, in this case the city council, wants you to violate your personal ethical principles. This e-book also features the ICMA Code of Ethics as a guideline for decision making.

Managing Human Resources: Local Government Cases: Recruitment, Promotion, and Affirmative Action describes one local government's attempt to improve its policies and procedures governing promotion in its police and fire departments. This e-book also highlights the role played by the forces of affirmative action.

Managing Human Resources: Local Government Cases: Reductions In Force deals with the problem of employee dismissals in a local government because of the need to achieve a reduction in force (RIF). This e-book demonstrates that such RIFs pose major managerial challenges, not the least of which is the difficulty for all the decision makers involved-the elected council, the manager, and the department heads-of having to decide what services get cut and which employees are terminated.

Managing Human Resources: Local Government Cases: Sexual Harassment Issues describes the challenges associated with changing attitudes and behaviors of employees concerning sexual harassment issues. This e-book demonstrates the important role employers and supervisors have in changing not only the way in which women peers and subordinates are regarded and treated, but also the way in which their subordinates relate to women in the workplace.

Managing Human Resources: Local Government Cases: ADA Issues describes the challenges associated with implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act in the workplace. This e-book also highlights the imposed added burdens upon employers to make reasonable accommodations for employess with disabilities.

Managing Human Resources: Local Government Cases: Fringe Benefits and Health Care Describes the challenges Sun City must consider in order to provide full insurance coverage to employees and its retired employees. This e-book also highlights the need for management to play very sophisticated games of council-management and labor-management relations.

Managing Human Resources: Local Government Cases: Labor-management Relations describes the plight of the city administration in Cedar Valley as it attempts to respond to ill-timed wage demands--first from its police officers and then from its firefighters while providing a useful insight into a very common reaction by the general public.. This e-book has all the elements of a typical local government labor relations controversy: substantial employee demands, tight budgets and taxpayer resistance to tax hikes, lack of experience on both sides of the negotiations, and reluctance on the part of the city to negotiate with employee organizations.

Managing Local Government Finance: Cases in Decision Making: Managing Debt and the Capital Budget describes the capital budgeting process, focusing particularly on the tough policy questions relating to capital financing. This e-book also describes the development of the capital budget; portrays the options for obtaining the money needed to implement the budget, including the advantages and disadvantages of each option; and sets forth the kinds of data to be analyzed in the process of selecting a financing option.

Managing Local Economic Development: Cases in Decision Making: Redeveloping the Waterfront discusses the challenges public administrators face when they get involved with economic development, which leads to simultaneously working in both the public and private sectors. Chief among those challenges is the need to navigate between the sometimes conflicting operating practices of the two sectors, including the need to reconcile the open, public information requirements of the public sector with the closed, confidential requirements of the private sector. This is the challenge that confronted public administrators in the village of Crystal Lake.

Keeping a community alive and healthy after the loss of an important employer-whether that employer is the military or some other governmental entity; a large, private sector business; or a tourist attraction-requires a major effort to fashion a new kind of place, a different community built on a different basis. Managing Local Economic Development: Cases in Decision Making: Nothing Concentrates the Mind Like the Threat of Death discusses the challenges the community leaders of Northport faced to devise and implement a strategy to chart such a new economic development strategy.

Managing Local Economic Development: Cases in Decision Making: Union County Economic Development Strategy discusses the challenge of transforming community opinion into an economic development operational strategy for Union County and improving the county's ability to contend with change, both past and future.