Heather Gillers
speaker
548 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2018
last heard Oct 2021
Heather Gillers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Even though there were 10 years of real growth, the hole that many cities were in and the debt that they were carrying on their books made it really difficult, even through a 10-year recovery, to get back to a really comfortable place of fiscal stability.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
It drove up spending in many places.
More people were employed.
There were all kinds of fringe benefits for local governments in terms of sales taxes and property taxes.
But in some ways made it harder to see the real damage that a lot of these cities sustained during the financial crisis and the recession period.
There was sort of a one-two punch in the sense that the crisis hit pension funds, which many, many local governments maintained and jacked up the contributions that they have to make out of their annual budgets.
pretty much hit those cities and school districts and other local governments right away.
Then there was sort of a lag effect where property values also fell, you know, as a result of the housing market crash.
That takes a little bit of time to really hit government budgets because it takes time for counties to assess the value of properties and to then
revise them downward.
But once that happens, it has a really profound and long-lasting effect on cities because property taxes are the biggest source of revenue for cities.
Well, the hardest hit regions have been the Midwest and the Northeast.
We're seeing...
fewer cities expecting a significant increase in revenue, you know, an increase that outpaces inflation all around the country, even in the South and West.
But those areas tend to be more resilient because of population growth generally and because of the industries that flourish there in the Midwest and in many parts of the Northeast.
On the other hand,
cities are still trying to recover from closures of manufacturing, factories, industry moving away.
And then many cities are also losing population.
You know, Chicago is losing population and many smaller cities in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, along with Pennsylvania, other northeastern areas.
Showing 261–280 of 548 · page 14 of 28
← Previous
Next →