On October 25, 1999 the Bangor ME (population 33,000) City Council passed a selective purchasing policy, establishing guidelines for buying clothing, footwear and other products from "responsible contractors."… Read More
The state of Illinois had a semi-proportional voting system to elect the lower House from 1870 to 1980. This was a minor modification of the winner-take-all rules. The state was divided into three-seat districts. Voters had three votes but had the option to give all three votes to one candidate. As a result, in Illinois, district typically had two representatives representing two major factions within the majority party and one representative from the minority party.… Read More
Cambridge’s nine City Councillors and six School Committee members are elected at large by Proportional Representation (PR) for a two year term. Any partly or candidate receiving more than 10 percent of the vote can obtain at least one seat on the Council.… Read More
In Amarillo, Texas, which is is 16 percent Latino and 6 percent black, a minority had not been elected to the school board since the 1970s.
In 1998, several concerned Black and Latino citizens, together with the Amarillo chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (and later the local NAACP), sued the school board under the Voting Rights Act. … Read More
Fed up with repeated state preemption of local laws, Michigan cities have spearheaded a campaign to require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, rather than a simple majority, to pass any law dealing with an issue that could be addressed by city, county, village or township government.… Read More
After a particularly serious chlorine dioxide leak, which could have injured thousands of workers had they been in the factory, the town selectmen instructed the town lawyer to draft an environmental ordinance. He hired environmental and constitutional lawyers, and they drafted the Jay Environmental and Improvement Ordinance, which was enacted by the people of Jay in a town meeting in May of 1988.… Read More
In May 1998, President Clinton issued Executive Order 13083 on Federalism. Its centralizing language generated such a firestorm of opposition from conservatives and state and local elected officials that the House of Representatives voted 417-2 to reject it.… Read More
Idaho was the first state to mandate in-state processing for logs harvested from state forests. Since becoming a state in 1890, Idaho has required all timber sales from state lands to be manufactured into lumber for timber products with the State of Idaho. … Read More
On occasion, governments at the local, state and federal level make purchasing policies that take factors besides price into consideration. For instance, some state and local governments prefer to purchase locally manufactured products, all other things being equal. Government agencies frequently purchase recycled paper for their offices, or environmentally friendly cleaners for their janitorial service, even … Read More