State and Local Government, Sponsored by Community Economic Development and Taxation

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Session Type: Section Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Hilton New Orleans Riverside

Room: Grand Salon Section 16

Floor: First Floor

Local governments, which have long struggled to meet their many challenges, are facing a growing gap in capacity. Many stand at the precipice of or are already confronting crises that strain their capacity to govern effectively. Aging infrastructure and escalating natural disasters demand both urgent and sustained public investment and attention. Yet even as these needs grow, many localities find themselves with fewer legal and financial options thanks to shrinking revenue streams, mounting debt obligations, escalating preemption campaigns by state legislatures, and increasingly unreliable federal support. These challenges make it harder for municipal governments—from schools to cities to transit agencies—to respond effectively to residents’ immediate needs and even harder to grow their institutional capacity for the long term. The result is a deepening disconnect between the scale of local challenges on one hand and the toolset available to address them on the other. These dynamics raise pressing questions about how policymakers, the legal profession, and legal educators can help rebuild capacity at the local level—or whether a broader rethink of some fundamental assumptions is needed. Many of these observations apply to the state level as well.