Municipal Management Quotes

The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.

When a certain spring, at some distance from the town is (excepting the rivers which are an hundred feet below the level of the town, with a very steep bank) the only resource for water --- a sufficient quantity of ground ought to be reserved round it and between it and the town, for conducting it into the town. There is also a stone quarry near it which ought not to be suffered to become private property. Both these ought to be vested in trustees for the use of the town. The most proper trustees would be an incorporation to be made of the town, to take place as soon as a sufficient number of inhabitants should be in it. Many will settle there next summer.

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

The mayoral mentality is incredibly valuable. I don't want to lose that.

I'm not interested in being Don Quixote. I'm interested in running the City of New York.

If you are the mayor of a city, one of the things you do is to try and gouge as much money out of the Federal Government as you can. That is your job.

It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.

That is one of the reasons why we have raised this matter about the need to focus quite sharply on the function of local government, but also on the resourcing of local government. Because it may very well be that we say to local government, you have got to run an indigent policy.

Some of the large [municipalities] in Quebec can contain within them most of the answers to their own practical problems. And so lots of different possibilities for doing things in a practical and different way become available.