Managing Public and Non-Profit Organizations

Approving or denying building permits and other land-use applications is an important role of local governments but one that often draws criticism from developers and citizens alike. This volume identifies an array of proven practices for bringing greater fairness, thoroughness, and speed to the development review process. The authors and a team of planning and development review professionals benchmarked with three national leaders and discovered seventy-eight distinctive practices accounting for the leaders' success. In doing so, the benchmarking team not only produced helpful advice for improving development review processes but also demonstrated the value to local governments of a type of benchmarking fairly common in the private sector but rarely used in the public sector.

This book discusses what federal and state law requires of public employers with respect to employee benefits and what authority North Carolina local government employers have in choosing, structuring, and changing benefits. Topics consist of retirement benefits, including retirement benefits for law enforcement officers; health insurance for current employees, including advice on how to avoid discriminating against employees on the basis of disability and age; retiree health insurance in light of GASB 45; life and disability insurance; employee wellness programs; workers' compensation; and paid and unpaid leave, including sick, vacation, and family and medical leave. A PDF download of the table of contents is available (https://www.sog.unc.edu/publications/books/employee-benefits-law-north-carolina-local-government-employers!/details).

Since this esteemed text was first published in 1997, the General Assembly of North Carolina has made important revisions to conflicts of interest law as well as enacted a law requiring local governments to adopt a code of ethics and local elected officials to receive ethics training and an ethics and lobbying law that, though intended for state officials, has important implications for local governments. This new edition of Ethics, Conflicts, and Offices greatly expands and updates the first version to reflect these significant changes in the law. Also updated are discussions of ethics in public life, multiple and incompatible office-holding, and legal cases, and numerous sample codes of ethics that can be used as guides in drafting local codes of conduct.

Presents the methods developed and used by the North Carolina Performance Measurement Project, an effort to encourage the use of performance measurement and benchmarking to produce comparable performance and cost data and to promote data use for the purpose of service or process improvement. It represents the work of local government officials in North Carolina who are committed to improving the numerous services provided by cities and counties.

This book examines the origins of the current system of government in North Carolina and the current allocation of responsibility for administration, finance, and policy between the state government and units of local government. A revised and expanded version of the 1985 edition, the purpose of this book is to aid public officials who wish to examine state and local government relationships and to help citizens who want to understand current governmental relationships and responsibilities and how they came to be.