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Family Friendly Planning

In 2008 Cornell University collaborated with the American Planning Association (APA) to conduct a survey of planners’ roles in creating family friendly communities.The survey was developed in focus groups of practicing planners with support from several APA regional and subject area divisions (e.g. housing and community development, planning and women). It explored three general sets of questions: planners’ attitudes about the importance of families to communities, actions planners can take to support families, and barriers to the creation of family friendly communities.

View the full results here.

The results also are discussed in the following APA Planning Advisory Service (PAS) memo:
Planning for Family Friendly Communities, by Evelyn Israel and Mildred Warner (November/December 2008).

Child Care Economic Impact

  • Child Care Economic Impact Studies: This module allows you to browse a database of studies about the economic impact of child care. A total of 100 studies from across the United States and Canada are described. Most studies have information about the agency that conducted the research, as well as links to the project web site and the report itself. A detailed case study is provided for selected projects.
     
  • 50 State Database: Many organizations provide data on early care and education. This database provides an overview of all current, national sources of comparative data on the early care and education sector including: child care economic data, demographic data, and early care and education program (policy) data. Thirty sources are profiled. These include federal census and administrative data, federal survey data, and national organizations that collect or maintain comparative data on children and families or early care and education more generally.

Local Government Restructuring 

A survey completed in 1996 and 1997 yielded results about service delivery restructuring among towns and counties in New York State. The summary of survey results presents the key findings of the survey, accompanied by graphic illustrations. You can also search the database created from the survey results to find out more about specific instances of restructuring in New York State towns and counties.

See also Warner, M.E. and Robert Hebdon. 2001 "Local Government Restructuring: Privatization and Its Alternatives," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 20(2):315-336. (Earlier version CRP Working Paper #179). 

Contracting Back In

Survey evidence shows that public officials are finding that privatization has its limits. While contracting out continues to be widely used by many local governments, the practice of "contracting back in" - where governments choose to resume in-house production following a period of privately produced service - is becoming increasingly common. The case in this database involve local governments bringing previously contracted work back in-house.

The cases are drawn from International City/County Management Association Survey Data of municipalities reporting a change from contracted services to in-house provision from 1992-1997. The cases are based on interviews conducted by Michael Ballard while working on a joint research project with Mildred Warner, Assoc. Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. The interviews were conducted in Summer of 1999.

View the database.

Tax and Expenditure Limitations

We have created a quantitative database of the restrictiveness of Tax and Expenditure Limitations (TELs) for municipalities, counties and school districts for all 50 states: TEL Restrictiveness Index Database

When using these data, please cite our article: Wen, C., Y. Xu, Y. Kim, and M. Warner. 2018. "Starving Counties, Squeezing Cities: Tax and Expenditure Limits in the US." Journal of Economic Policy Reform. doi: 10.1080/17487870.2018.1509711.