2009 Panel Leadership

                       Vice Chair                                    Chair                                      Vice Chair 
                                                                      
                            Aaron Azari                              Lee Feldman                   Mary Alice Cisneros
                        Council Member                         City Manager                      Council Member
                        Arvada, Colorado                     Palm Bay, Florida              San Antonio, Texas

Overview
The Public Finance Panel's mission is to foster and shape a broader and more visible public discourse about the need for reform to the system of public finance and to the related intergovernmental system, and to provide guidance and recommendations to city officials about dealing with specific fiscal challenges in their cities.

The Panel has developed a framework for understanding the fiscal and intergovernmental challenges facing cities and an action plan, published in a report that was adopted by the NLC Board of Directors in 2006, Taxing Problems: Municipalities and America's Flawed System of Public Finance.  The Board-approved report builds on the Panel's earlier work and report, Toward a System of Public Finance for the 21st Century (2001).

Challenges identified by the panel include:
- A mismatch between contemporary economic growth and tax structures created more than a half-century ago, and the unfairness and inequities created by this mismatch;
- An unraveling of the partnership between federal, state, and local governments for funding and delivering public services;
- Changing demographics, urbanization, suburbanization, population growth and immigration, and the changing composition of households and the implications of those changes for city services and costs; and
- Political challenges to public finance including the lack of civic engagement in democratic processes and the anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric that often pervades public discussion about government and finance.

Other Activities and Products
- Developed and disseminated NLC resolutions (1) addressing the need for a venue for analysis of and discourse about intergovernmental relations and (2) expressing opposition to tax and expenditure limits on local governments; 
- The Panel is engaged in an ongoing collaboration with NLC's Finance, Administration, and Intergovernmental Relations (FAIR) Policy Committee about federal tax reform;
- The Panel contributes ideas to NLC's ongoing research efforts to monitor city fiscal health, published in NLC's annual survey report on City Fiscal Conditions;
- The Panel played an advisory role in NLC's report, Cities and State Fiscal Structure analyzing differences in local tax systems and structure across the 50 states conducted in conjunction with the Pew Center on the States and the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago;
- The Panel served as the Advisory Committee for NLC's Legislating For Results project, a project that provided local officials with training and assistance in using performance information to improve local outcomes, conducted in conjunction with The Urban Institute;

2009 Panel Members

Next Meeting of the Panel
Congressional City Conference, March 16, 2009, Washington, DC

Congress of Cities and Exposition, November 10-14, 2009, San Antonio, Texas

Visit the NLC Issue page on Public Finance

For more information about the Panel contact:

Chris Hoene
National League of Cities
1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20004
(202) 626-3172
Fax:  (202) 626-3043
E-mail: hoene@nlc.org