State Government and Urban Development Patterns in Illinois

2016

Despite the fact that infrastructure is a critical part of daily life for all Americans, the infrastructure deficit in the United States grows with each passing day. The National League of Cities (NLC) today released a new report on the ability of cities to address the nation's growing infrastructure challenges. The costs of building, operating and maintaining road, transit and water/wastewater systems are falling increasingly to local governments with the decline of state and federal funding, an increase in mandates and a misalignment of priorities. In this era of "new federalism," local governments have assumed a greater responsibility to meet their infrastructure needs, but much of this devolution of responsibility has come without authority to raise funds locally."Paying for Local Infrastructure in a New Era of Federalism" shows that cities need a more deliberate approach that recognizes the central role of infrastructure in the success of our nation'...

The past two decades have witnessed substantial changes in the dynamics of state-local relationships for highway funding. We argue that four factors have produced a funding crisis for local governments: an increase in developed land and locally owned roads; a rise in construction and maintenance costs; devolution of highway financing responsibility from the states to localities with a reduction in intergovernmental transfers; and more wear and tear on roads due to increased vehicle miles traveled. Local governments can delay maintenance and build fewer new facilities, but eventually many will seek new sources of revenues to fund their growing responsibilities. We identify several potential financing mechanisms: impact fees and smart growth policies; local option transportation taxes; nontraditional taxes and fees such as transportation utility fees and land taxes; and low-cost debt financing from state infrastructure banks. We discuss challenges faced by local governments in continuing to meet their responsibilities and financing needs.

Public Budgeting & Finance, 2007

Do states engage in infrastructure expenditure competition to attract new economic activity? Economic theory is inconclusive on the matter. States might respond to increased infrastructure spending in competitor states by increasing their own infrastructure spending. Conversely, states may decrease spending in the presence of positive spillovers from competitor states' infrastructure investment. Using spatial econometric techniques and focusing specifically on highway spending, we demonstrate that states expend less on highways when spending in neighboring states increases. We explore this possibility further by modeling state personal income growth as a function of own-state and neighborstate highway spending. Our findings suggest positive spillovers influence interstate relationships for highway spending rather than race-to-the-top competition for economic activity.

National Tax Journal, 1965

Transport infrastructure development is considered one of the basic structural preconditions of competitiveness, growth and economic development in Slovakia. Transport network upgrading in the country has recently been focused mainly on road and motorway networks. The goal of this paper is to contribute to existing approaches to transport infrastructure impact assessment. The paper presents selected results of qualitative research focused on an analysis of the R1 expressway (as a part of TENT network) and its impacts on the economic, social and environmental dimensions of life at the local territorial level. The paper also seeks to answer the basic question, whether and to what extent the new section of the expressway brings any stimuli to regional or local development. Qualitative research realized by field sociological methods has shown new data and information necessary for a complex assessment of transport infrastructure impacts on social and economic development of regions. We assume that these impacts should not be based purely on mathematic and statistical research methods. KEY WORDS transport-R1 expressway-Slovakia-investment-direct and indirect impacts

2009

Applying a Barro-style model of endogenous growth to a fifty-year panel of states from 1957 to 2007, We examine the extent to which expenditures on public education and infrastructure— together with the taxes necessary to support them— enhance or impede the steady-state growth of state and local economies, as measured by per capita personal income. Our findings suggest that the independent effect of tax expenditures on either public infrastructure or education alone is significantly negative, but the complementary effect of each on the other is positive enough to make their combined effect significantly positive— except at large scales, where we find diseconomies, consistent with the ‘growth hill’ predicted by theory. Policy effects are identified empirically using a recursive structure with very long lags, GMM/instrumental variables, and controls for both fixed and time-varying heterogeneity. Results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications.

Journal of Urban Planning and Development, 2005

The access that state highways provide to adjacent land enables the development of that land. Although access alone does not ensure that development will occur, land with access from a state highway has considerably greater development potential than land without such access. City governments regulate the development of the land, while the state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) wield authority over the adjacent state highways. This separation of authority creates a significant challenge for state DOTs as they work to expand state highway facilities in a bid to stay apace with the explosive growth of U.S. metropolitan areas. This paper identifies methods adopted by local governments and state DOTs to coordinate land use policies and manage development along state highways. We find that regardless of whether a state has legislation that supports state-local cooperation, the city government's willingness to partner with the DOT remains a critical factor in the success of coordination efforts for managing land use along state highways.

IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science, 2018

The Right to Education Act 2009 created a right to free and mandatory schooling for every child of the age 06 to 14 years until the accomplishment of the elementary school. Additionally, according to the United States Department of Education (2018), more than 14,000 school districts at the local level are solely responsible for running public schools, developing and implementing their own educational programs, employing and managing professional teaching staffs, arranging fund to pay for schools and implementing the federal and state policy in this regard as well as these schools got finance from the state, local and federal government, however, lion amount of outlays and spending come from the state and local level governments. In this context, this paper will try to analyze the recent trends of outlays and spending on the state and local government policies and infrastructure specifically education policy areas with a brief literature review. The secondary sources will be used to analyze the outlays and expenditure of state and local government's education policy areas.

… Center, University of …, 1998

2010

Public school planning and land use planning have become increasingly separated fields over the last 40 years. The result is a often disjointed growth pattern where new schools are built on the urban fringe and act as a magnet for new development that often goes against desired development patterns. Previous research on school locations, development patterns and school finance has focused on institutional barriers to cooperation and strategies to help local governments cooperate better with local land use planners. To date, there has been no significant research that attempts to quantify the relationship between school location, development patterns and the transportation infrastructure necessary to serve new development, and the impact of school sales tax initiatives on local transportation strategies. This research shows that there is a relationship between school location and new development. Four counties in Georgia were selected as case studies and analyzed with a Geographic Information System (GIS) to determine the significance of the relationship between the two. Counties were selected based on their character (urban, suburban, exurban, rural) and analyzed separately. An elementary school and high school were analyzed for each county. In addition, interviews with school facility planners were conducted to further define what institutional barriers prevent cooperation among local land use planners and school planners. It was found that there is a wide range of levels of cooperation between school planners and local planners. Some school districts had a formalized communication process with local planners, some had an ad-hoc communication process, and others had no process at all. Recommendations are made on ways to improve the cooperation between these two professional fields. This report also examines the link between education and transportation sales tax funding. This study analyzed SPLOST referenda results in Georgia to better understand the propensity of voters to approve transportation and education sales taxes, and the implications of the approval of one referendum on voter approval of another. Since 1998, sales tax referenda have generally seen yearly pass rates greater than 80%. After the introduction of education SPLOSTs in 1997, the yearly number of non-education sales tax referenda on the ballot in Georgia dropped from around 38 per year to around 31 per year. However, the pass rates for non-education referenda went from 83.4% in 1985 to 1997 to 93% in the period from 1998 to 2009. In analyzing the impacts of education and transportation referenda on one another, there