When Congress passed the Financial Data and Transparency Act (FDTA) in 2022, it required all municipalities in the U.S. to modernize and digitize their financial reports. This is a heavy lift for small towns and school districts, most of which still...
Despite significant opportunities for infusions of federal funding over the past two years, Michigan local officials report little change in the fiscal health of their local governments and feel concerned about their governments’ long-term financial...
When City of Flint CFO Rob Widigan looks at his required annual financial reporting to the state of Michigan, he sighs. His department needs to compile the accounts, which are saved as a PDF document, and separately copy certain numbers into at...
A majority of Michigan local leaders' assessments of their fiscal stress this year remain essentially unchanged compared to both 2021 and 2020, despite significant infusions of federal and state aid in recent years.
The findings come from the...
Through a Michigan pilot program, Stephanie Leiser and the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy are building a taxonomy for machine-readable local government financial documents.
"Transparency into local government fiscal health is needed...
The turmoil surrounding the City of Flint, MI – most infamously the Flint Water Crisis – has become a cautionary tale for other Rust Belt cities struggling to balance their budgets, provide services, and attract new business. A 20-year review of the...
Michigan’s local governments report improvement on many fiscal health measures after a year of struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, but for much of the state the situation has stayed the same or continues to decline, according to a new Michigan...
Local leaders from across the state have reported lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report, and worsening outlooks for how much longer some of those impacts will last. While the numbers of local communities reporting on...
ANN ARBOR—More than two-thirds of Michigan’s local government leaders rate their jurisdictions’ current fiscal stress as relatively low, according to a new survey by the University of Michigan’s Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy.
On the...
It’s been a tumultuous decade in Michigan: three governors, a cratered economy and its recovery, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, a public health disaster in Flint, and more.
Through it all, the Michigan Public Policy Survey...
Local government officials’ assessments of their own fiscal health is often at odds with—and worse than—what their financial statements indicate, according to work done by Stephanie Leiser and Sarah Mills. The researchers note that this could be...
Overall, the fiscal health of Michigan's local governments appears to have improved slightly since last year, according to a new survey by University of Michigan researchers.
Across the state, 35 percent of the local government leaders surveyed...
An overwhelming majority of local government leaders in Michigan support reform of the state's controversial emergency manager law, according to a new survey by University of Michigan researchers.Officials from more than 1,300 cities, counties,...
The Detroit Free Press Editorial Board asks, “Lansing, are you listening to Michigan cities?” The piece draws attention to the latest Michigan Public Policy Survey on the fiscal health of the state’s local governments.
The University of...
The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy’s (CLOSUP) most recent Michigan Public Policy Survey finds a reversal in the trend of improving fiscal health among Michigan local governments.Despite an improving economy, fewer local governments say...
ANN ARBOR—About two-thirds of local governments in Michigan rate the levels of fiscal stress as relatively low in their jurisdictions today, while just 7 percent rate the stress as high.
While the latter percentage is low, the figure represents...
Join XBRL US for a session to explore government data standards, find out how governments can create their own machine-readable financial statements, and discover what impact this legislation could have on government entities. Most importantly, discover how machine-readable data standards can benefit state and local government entities by reducing costs and increasing access to time-sensitive information for policy making.
Local government fiscal health is typically assessed using objective financial indicators, but little is understood about how local officials subjectively understand their own fiscal health. We compare self-assessment data from the Michigan Public Policy Survey with financial data on Michigan local governments to explore the extent to which self-assessments align with conventional financial indicators. Qualitative results reveal that local officials emphasize long-term spending pressures (e.g. roads, infrastructure) and external factors, such as uncertainty around property values and state aid (i.e. revenue sharing) payments, when assessing their fiscal health. Quantitative results provide some corroborating evidence, but in general, conventional indicators are not powerful predictors of self-assessments, especially for high-stress governments. We believe that part of the disparity is that financial indicators do a poor job of capturing what local officials say they are most worried about. We suggest that self-assessments may be a useful supplement to conventional measures in capturing “true” fiscal health.
