‘Unprecedented Legislative Intrusion’ in Texas; Idaho City Fights ‘War on Wolves’
The University of Texas at Austin blanscape / Shutterstock.com
Also in our daily State & Local roundup: Hawaii’s web award and Atlantic City’s health-care safety net.
Here are some stories from our daily State & Local roundup of stories you may have missed from around the country …
AUSTIN, Texas: The University of Texas System regents have sent a message loud and clear to state legislators: stay out. On Monday, the regents voted unanimously to prohibit lawmakers from attending interviews for “an investigation of alleged political influence in admissions” at UT’s flagship Austin campus, according to Reeve Hamilton of The Texas Tribune. One regent described two lawmakers' declared intentions to sit in on all of the external interviews as "an unwarranted, inappropriate and unprecedented legislative intrusion into a core executive branch function."
ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey: If there’s a bright spot for newly unemployed or soon-to-be unemployed casino workers in this economically troubled seaside resort town, it’s this: Many of the jobless now have Obamacare as a health-insurance option. Terrence Dopp of Bloomberg News reports:
As many as 400 people among 2,500 who signed up for a Sept 10 job fair in Atlantic City asked about enrolling in health coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, illustrating the law’s potential safety-net role in an economy still buffeted by headwinds.
KETCHUM, Idaho: Members of the City Council passed a resolution on Monday urging the state of Idaho to stop killing wolves in Blaine County, Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman reports. “The purpose of the resolution is to differentiate the City of Ketchum’s values and polices from the State of Idaho’s and to ask for a different wolf management approach in Blaine County,” the resolution reads, and “also requests that Idaho’s war on wolves not come to Blaine County where opportunities for wolf watching and tracking enhance our economy.”
NEW YORK CITY, New York: "The wealth of city data available online needs to be made usable," Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer said, according to Kristen Meriwether of Gotham Gazette. "Simply dumping data on the Internet does not qualify as transparency." Brewer on Monday announced a new partnership with the City University of New York’s Service Corps program where 15 paid interns who will help mine the city’s open-data portal.
HONOLULU, Hawaii: The Hawaii state government’s website, relaunched in 2013, has been named the “Best Government Website” as part of the Web Marketing Association’s WebAwards. As Clayton Wakida of KITV-TV writes, the relaunch was a “comprehensive update … released in conjunction with upgrades to webpages across all state departments and agencies, enhanced mobile, touch and speech capability, increased consistency, and improved accessibility.”
(Photo by Blanscape / Shutterstock.com)