To paraphrase former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill: “All government is local.” Governance works its way through our lives in concentric circles from the family, to the school, to the city, to the county, to the state, and to myriad other entities. And the government that inevitably touches us most on a daily basis is local government.
January 30, 2015
Chair’s Message
Do you care about elections and voting rights? How about health and social issues that have a strong component of government regulation, like e-cigarettes and medical/recreational marijuana? Do we respond individually to emergencies or disasters in our communities or do we expect our local governments not only to respond but to anticipate and plan for them? These are just a few of the topics that we addressed at the Section’s Fall Meeting in Denver, and it reminded me of how lucky I was to be a lawyer working in local government law.
Like almost every conference, the success of this meeting was the product of the efforts of a host of people. My thanks to all of them and especially to C. Elisia Frazier and the National Bar Association for their help in bringing highly competent speakers to our panels.
Programming for the ABA Midyear Meeting in February will once again include a variety of hot topics in diversity law. Together with our “Diversity Networking Reception,” this presentation has been a focal point of the Section’s efforts to reach out to new members and to educate current members. Our Attorney General and Department of Justice Issues Committee is moving on from e-cigarettes to student debt obligations and exploring the many effects of this problem of mounting personal debt. And, if you thought that, like quinoa, RLUIPA was the newest exotic grain that we need to include in our daily diet, I recommend you join us for a lively debate on the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act with a panel of national experts. The impact of this law on local communities is not yet fully explored or fully appreciated.
I know that it is hard to get to meetings. That is why we try our best to produce quality CLE programs and publish The Urban Lawyer and books that will help you to improve your practice or to fulfill your goal of lifetime learning. We cover topics that are recurring in nature, like § 1983 litigation (Sword and Shield) and arbitrage (ABCs of Arbitrage), that are essential to good government lawyering, like sunshine laws (Public Records and Access to Government in the Computer Age), ethics (Ethical Standards in the Public Sector), and zoning (Zoning Deskbook and Group Homes), and that are more cutting edge, like hydraulic fracturing (Beyond the Fracking Wars).
If you scan our lengthy list of CLE programs and book titles and you scour the pages of The Urban Lawyer and you still do not find your burning issue, let me know what it is. The Section is always searching for ideas for CLE programming and publications. You can help us. Just write me an e-mail or call me. One of my goals as Chair is to get at least five e-mails from members that I do not already know in response to solicitations like this one. So far, I am up to zero. It is a good thing that I am not in sales.
In my first message to you, I promised to improve the quantity and quality of singing at all Section Council meetings. Although it is not clear whether this singing is a good thing or a bad thing, I can report that the quantity of singing is definitely up. We sang two songs at our Section Council meeting on October 12, and one song was sung a cappella. If you felt a tremor in the Force on that date, you now know why. We will work on quality when we meet in Philadelphia in the spring.
I end this message with a mixture of sadness and joy. I am sad that we have lost one of our greatest leaders in local government—Tommy Menino, former Mayor of Boston. He cared deeply about the people of Boston and tried his best to make their lives better every day. At the ABA Annual Meeting in Boston, the Section honored Tommy with our Jefferson Fordham Society Award for Advocacy. I got to meet Tommy at that meeting. And that gives me great joy.
When I was shopping for a bow tie for Tommy before the award ceremony, I happened to mention that I would be meeting him the next day. I knew that I was in for something special when the salesmen said: “Say ‘hi’ to Tommy for us.” I was lucky enough to be able to pass along that greeting to a man who, like his hero Harry S. Truman, was a real man of the people.