State & Local Weekly News Wrap-Up

By Timothy Brett posted Apr 09,2012 12:49 PM

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MULTI-JURISDISDICTION

Unemployment fell in 29 states in February and rose in only eight, the government reported last week, in another sign of broad improvement in the U.S. labor market. The improvement means there are only three states with unemployment above the 10% mark - Nevada with a 12.3% unemployment rate, Rhode Island, which has 11% unemployment, and California, where unemployment stood at 10.9%. North Carolina and Mississippi dropped out of the states with double-digit unemployment. As many as 19 states suffered 10% or more unemployment as a result of the recent recession. As recently as last September, there had been 10 states with a jobless rate of 10% or more. Despite suffering from the nation's highest unemployment rate, Nevada did enjoy one of the biggest improvements in the month, as the 0.4 percentage point decline trailed only the 0.5 point improvement in Mississippi. The overall national unemployment rate was 8.3% in February, as government figures show employers adding almost 250,000 jobs on average over each of the last three months. The report also showed that the number of jobs increased in 42 different states in February. State unemployment report shows widespread improvement

City governments are jumping on the social media train in a big way, more than tripling their use of social platforms in a two-year span between 2009 and 2011, according to a national study by the University of Illinois at Chicago that ranks cities on how well they interact with people online. The study of the country’s 75 largest cities found that 87% of them had a presence on both Facebook and Twitter, and 75% had YouTube links. Meanwhile, cities are making some progress in offering their constituents open data portals for making use of government information, although only 12 cities currently have them and they often present unstructured data that’s difficult for people to use. Who's on first: Ranking the best U.S. cities online

CONTRACTING/ACQUISITION

E-mail systems, prone to proliferation and notoriously expensive to manage, are often near the top of the list of suspects when state and local government IT executives look for places to cut costs. Indeed, consolidating legacy e-mail systems as a cost-reducing, efficiency-boosting measure is even a matter of law in some jurisdictions. But for IT shops arriving at the crossroads of financial pain and technological aging, the way forward looks a lot different than it did just a couple of years ago. Cloud computing now offers private, public, and hybrid alternatives to the classic in-house consolidation project. Those options could help cash-strapped governments trim equipment, maintenance and administrative costs when compared with in-house installations, a financial lure that hasn’t been lost on vendors who have bid exclusively cloud-based solutions in some recent e-mail procurements. Consolidation at the crossroads: 4 paths taken

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