Glendale Council Member Laura Friedman will be representing Glendale at a historic summit meeting of city, county and school officials July 17-18 in Sacramento. The Local Government Summit on Governance and Fiscal Reform will be a forum where mayors, council members, county supervisors and school board members from across California will discuss emerging proposals to reform state governance and fiscal systems will be discussed and debated.

“There is no more critical issue at the moment than addressing governance and fiscal reform so our city can efficiently operate and meet our residents’ needs,” says Friedman. “Despite our efforts on the local level to operate efficiently and maintain services, we are continually being negatively impacted by decisions on the State level.” Friedman added that the summit was called to exchange strategies on how California government at every level can be changed to become more responsive and effective.

Today in California state government institutions are increasingly seen as broken. Record state deficits, late and unbalanced budgets, and an inability to address the critical issues of the day – energy, water, education, health services, and more – all point towards the inescapable conclusion that our governmental system at the state level is dysfunctional. The state’s governance crisis is due in large measure to the more fundamental problem of over-concentrating decision making at the state level at the expense of true local priority setting and spending decisions.

One example of the dysfunction of state government is that the state has taken upwards of $10 billion in city property taxes to help meet state budget obligations to schools since 1991, yet state spending on schools is among the lowest if not the lowest in the nation. With the current economic downturn, the state government is facing its day of reckoning, and the results are deeply troubling. The summit will provide a forum for, hundreds of city, county and school leaders to discuss reforms to address these pressing problems and the way in which they can be implemented.

The two day summit is sponsored by the Cities Counties School Partnership which is a collaboration of the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties and the California School Boards Association.

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