Webinar: Getting Ahead of Federal Guidelines

How Transportation Decision-Makers Can Implement an Agile Framework for Equitable Public Involvement

Wednesday, February 22 | 2 PM (ET)/11 AM (PT)

In this information-packed webinar, I joined experts from PublicInput and StreetLight to cover the USDOT’s six features of meaningful public involvement and how to build a framework that ensures success in these pillars: 

  • Understanding your community demographics

  • Building durable community relationships

  • Understanding community wants and needs

  • Involving broad representation of community

  • Using community-preferred engagement techniques

  • Documenting and sharing community’s impact on decisionsPublic Input and Streetlight in breaking down what policy makers and practitioners need to know about successfully accessing federal funds for transformative investments.

Webinar: What to Watch for in Local Government in 2022

In December, I had the pleasure of joining former Philadelphia Mayor Mike Nutter and former Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser. Mark now runs the consulting firm Funkhouser & Associates where I am a part-time consultant, and we recently launched an industry webinar series. This one focused on the main issues to watch in state and local government in 2022.

Our conversation provided a handy digest of key provisions in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and examined how its provisions intersect with today’s biggest challenges faced by states, cities and counties. Spotlighting the role of public-private partnerships, we outlined areas where industry partners can aid jurisdictions at this critical juncture to boost workforce capacity and support operational efficiency and innovation.

CBS This Morning Podcast: Why Some Small Towns Don't Want Their American Rescue Plan Money

The latest federal COVID-19 stimulus package allocates $19.53 billion to support tens of thousands of small local governments across the country. But with difficult rules to follow and small staffs to make sure the money is being used correctly, spending these relief funds will be difficult for many small towns and counties.

I spoke with CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O'Keefe about my reporting on this issue. The money going towards small localities is so much more than they're used to receiving, they'd have to go through unprecedented efforts to keep track of it all. It's prompting questions about whether towns and counties with normally small budgets even want to deal with the federal funding at all.

Click here to play.

Panel: Remote Work and Antifragility

In March, I joined a discussion hosted by Funkhouser & Associates on antifragility and remote work as part of Govapalooza’s four-day festival highlighting innovation in government. The event talks about how the pandemic forced local governments to make an abrupt shift to remote work and virtual meetings. Governments found that they and their workforces were more agile and adaptive than they knew.

Panelists: Berke Attila, HR director, Montgomery County, Maryland; Lori Sassoon, ACM for administrative services, Rancho Cucamonga, California; Liz Farmer, Rockefeller Institute of Government Future of Work Research Fellow and consultant at Funkhouser & Assoc.

Event held at Govapalooza, spring 2021

Spectrum News: How Cities Can Survive Post-COVID Pandemic

“Liz Farmer is not ready to write off cities just yet.”

In November 2020, Spectrum News Albany’s Nick Reisman interviewed me about my latest work for the Rockefeller Institute on the pandemic’s affect on downtowns. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

New York City residents, if they were wealthy enough, fled to Long Island or to upstate communities to escape the spread of the virus. And smaller cities, like Albany, have seen less foot traffic downtown and fewer people riding mass transit. 

All this has a cascading effect: A drop in tax revenue being among them, but also a cultural change to how we live and work. 

"We don't know for example the people who moved out of New York City and are renting a house -- are they going to make that decision permanent?" Farmer said in an interview. "It's one thing to make that decision for a year, it's another to plant roots for five, ten, fifteen years."

Click here to read the full piece.

Tampa Bay Times: Thousands in Tampa Bay are working from home. What about after the quarantine?

The Tampa Bay Times’ Malena Carollo takes a look at how the pandemic-era quarantine could affect the landscape of Tampa Bay’s professional workforce. Here’s an excerpt from the piece, which sites my work at the Rockefeller Institute:

Just a few months ago, many business owners didn’t consider a remote workforce realistic. But government-mandated stay-at-home orders have forced the issue, causing companies that can to adapt to getting work done without employees in the office.

How, then, will Tampa Bay’s workforce look once quarantine ends?

“You are going to see an acceleration of what has already been a trend over the last decade,” said Liz Farmer, research fellow and fiscal policy writer at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.

That trend is an increased number of employees telecommuting — working from home a few days per week or month — and potentially working from home full time. In 1997, about 7 percent of employees in the U.S. worked at home at least one day per week, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That figure climbed to just more than 9 percent in 2010.

Read the full article here.