Sign up for Route Fifty TodayYour daily read on state and local governmentConnecting state and local government leadersOn an unseasonably warm November morning in 2016, Youngstown’s business and political leaders crowded onto a small, scraggly plot of land on the Ohio city’s long-suffering East Side. Reeling from decades of decline, the area was a patchwork of potholed streets, weeded lots, moldering homes and drive-thru liquor marts.But on this day, the city, once a national center of steel manufacturing and now a poster child for industrial decay, was celebrating the groundbreaking of a...…Sign up for Route Fifty TodayYour daily read on state and local governmentConnecting state and local government leadersOn an unseasonably warm November morning in 2016, Youngstown’s business and political leaders crowded onto a small, scraggly plot of land on the Ohio city’s long-suffering East Side. Reeling from decades of decline, the area was a patchwork of potholed streets, weeded lots, moldering homes and drive-thru liquor marts.But on this day, the city, once a national center of steel manufacturing and now a poster child for industrial decay, was celebrating the groundbreaking of a...WW…

Sign up for Route Fifty TodayYour daily read on state and local governmentFeatured eBooksConnecting state and local government leadersBy March 14, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, had seen enough. For weeks, she and her health officials had looked at data showing the evolving threat of COVID-19. In response, she’d issued a series of orders limiting the size of public gatherings, each one feeling more arbitrary than the last. She’d been persuaded that her city’s considerable and highly regarded health care system might be insufficient for the looming onslaught of infection and...…Sign up for Route Fifty TodayYour daily read on state and local governmentFeatured eBooksConnecting state and local government leadersBy March 14, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, had seen enough. For weeks, she and her health officials had looked at data showing the evolving threat of COVID-19. In response, she’d issued a series of orders limiting the size of public gatherings, each one feeling more arbitrary than the last. She’d been persuaded that her city’s considerable and highly regarded health care system might be insufficient for the looming onslaught of infection and...WW…

Sign up for Route Fifty TodayYour daily read on state and local governmentConnecting state and local government leadersFailed businesses and lost loved ones, empty  and socially distanced funerals, a struggling economy and an unmitigated public-health disaster: This is the worst-of-both-worlds equilibrium the United States finds itself in.Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has railed against shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, tweeting  that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” and pushing for employees to get...…Sign up for Route Fifty TodayYour daily read on state and local governmentConnecting state and local government leadersFailed businesses and lost loved ones, empty  and socially distanced funerals, a struggling economy and an unmitigated public-health disaster: This is the worst-of-both-worlds equilibrium the United States finds itself in.Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has railed against shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, tweeting  that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” and pushing for employees to get...WW…