Connecting state and local government leaders
Also in our State & Local roundup: Stories from Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio.
Here’s our daily State & Local news roundup for Monday, September 29, 2014 ...
SACRAMENTO, California: Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation on Sunday that would have required law enforcement to seek a warrant before using drone surveillance. Brown, according to Phil Willon and Melanie Mason of the Los Angeles Times, said that although he thought there were some circumstances where a warrant for drone surveillance was necessary, the legislation, introduced by Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, went too far. "It's disappointing that the governor decided to side with law enforcement in this case over the privacy interests of California," Gorrell said, according to the Times.
RALEIGH, North Carolina: The state’s health and human services secretary testified before a legislative committee on Monday that “North Carolina’s system for investigating suspicious deaths has been ‘chronically understaffed and underfunded,’” Ames Alexander and Fred Clasen-Kelly report for The Charlotte Observer, which published a five-part series earlier this year documenting how “medical examiners routinely take shortcuts when investigating suspicious, violent and accidental deaths.”
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky: Small egg-shaped air monitors deployed around the city aren’t are useful as they were envisioned as James Bruggers reports for the Courier-Journal. They “do not consistently report their readings through the Internet, are not reliably accurate, and are not designed to allow comparison of pollution data from one device to another.” The egg-shaped air monitors have experienced similar problems in Boston.
The Maumee River at Toledo, Ohio
TOLEDO, Ohio: Mayor D. Michael Collins wants to revisit a 2011 deal that privatized the city’s trash-collection services. As Ignazio Messina of The Blade reports, the mayor thinks the privatization arrangement with a Michigan-based firm is too favorable to the company. While some city officials were not pleased with the privatization deal, they say it would be difficult for the city to resume providing trash-collection services. “We opened Pandora’s box . . . but I would say it’s too late for us now to go back,” one councilmember said.
BOULDER, Colorado: Officials in this city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains are telling residents that their bear-resistant trash containers aren’t effective in keeping bears out when they’re not latched properly. As Erica Meltzer of the Daily Camera reports, an enforcement will begin this week in parts of the city covered by an ordinance passed this spring that mandates that all trash and composting containers “must meet specific bear-resistant requirements.”
(Photo of Gov. Brown by Dan Holm / Shutterstock.com; photo of Toledo by Michael Shake / Shutterstock.com)