UNC President Margaret Spellings will deliver the 2017 Deil S. Wright Lecture on March 31 at the School of Government. The event is free and open to the public. Nationally known as an education thought leader and public policy expert, Spellings most recently served as president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. Spellings previously served as president and CEO of Margaret Spellings & Company, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, US secretary of education, and chief domestic policy advisor for President George W. Bush. Spellings is a graduate of the University of Houston, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. She also received an honorary doctorate and Distinguished Alumna Award from the university in 2006.

The Deil S. Wright Lecture Series is hosted by the Master of Public Administration program at UNC-Chapel Hill and sponsored by Fidelity Investments and the MPA Alumni Association.

In a blog post for the Harvard Law and Policy Review, faculty member Maureen Berner proposes innovative ideas for reframing food insecurity as an economic development issue.

Faculty member Kimberly Nelson has been appointed to the editorial board for Public Administration Review, a journal dedicated to the theory and practice in public administration. She will serve for a three-year term.

Faculty member Michele Hoyman, together with MPA alum Jamie McCall ’06, published an article in Economic Development Quarterly on the connection between social capital and economic development in U.S. counties.

Faculty member Willow Jacobson with co-author Jessica Sowa published an article in State and Local Government Review on workforce-related challenges municipal governments faced during the great recession and human resource-related innovations that were developed to respond.

Faculty member David Ammons will serve as keynote speaker at the national Public Performance Measurement and Reporting Conference on September 22, 2016. His address is titled, “So, Who Will ACTUALLY Do Performance Management in Your Government?” The conference is hosted by Rutgers University-Newark.

The new, sixth edition of faculty member Maureen Berner’s popular textbook, Research Methods for Public Administration, is now available from Routledge.

Assistant Professor Whitney Afonso‘s article, “State LST Laws: A Comprejensive Analysis of the Laws Governing Local Sales Taxes,” has been published in Public Budgeting & Finance.

Local sales taxes (LSTs) have received growing attention over the past decade, but a fundamental aspect of LSTs has remained largely unexplored: How do state laws governing LSTs differ from one another? The literature acknowledges that state laws vary widely, but leaves the discussion at that. This research seeks to fill that void by presenting a comprehensive set of state LST laws and creating a resource that will enable researchers to consider these differences in their analyses. State LST laws are framed within the lenses of jurisdictional eligibility and discretionary authority.

Afonso joined the School of Government in 2012. She was named Albert and Gladys Hall Coates Distinguished Term Assistant Professor for 2015–2017. Prior to that time, she taught at the University of Georgia, Department of Public Administration and Policy; and Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Administration. Her research into how the choice of revenue streams by state and local governments affect government and citizen behavior has been presented at the annual conferences for the National Tax Association, Association for Budgeting and Financial Management, American Society for Public Administration, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. In October 2016, she was recognized by Public Budgeting & Finance with its Jesse Burkhead Award. Her article, “Leviathan or Flypaper: Earmarked Local Sales Taxes for Transportation,” was selected as the journal’s top article in 2015. Afonso earned a BA in political science from Vanderbilt University, and an MA in economics and PhD in public administration and policy from the University of Georgia.

Associate Professor Leisha DeHart-Davis draws on a decade of original research and interdisciplinary scholarship in her new book, Creating Effective Rules in Public Sector Organizations. This book provides the first comprehensive portrait of rules in public organizations and seeks to find the balance between rules that create red tape and rules that help public organizations function effectively, what the author calls “green tape.”

The creation of rules that govern processes or behavior is essential to any organization, but these rules are often maligned for creating inefficiencies. DeHart-Davis builds a framework of three perspectives on rules: the organizational perspective, which sees rules as a tool for achieving managerial goals and organizational functions; the individual perspective, which examines how rule design and implementation affect employees; and the behavioral perspective, which explores human responses to the intersection of the first two perspectives. The book is available from Georgetown University Press.

DeHart-Davis joined the School of Government in 2012. She was named Albert and Gladys Hall Coates Distinguished Term Associate Professor for 2015–2017. She directs Human Capital Matters, a line of programming for human resource professionals in NC local government, and co-directs Engaging Women, a program that seeks to equip women to pursue public service leadership positions. DeHart-Davis was named a Top 100 Local Government Influencer by the Emerging Local Government Leaders Network in 2016. She teaches human resource management and the portfolio course in the School’s Master of Public Administration program. DeHart-Davis holds a PhD in public policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In the video, “Food for the Summer,” School of Government and MPA faculty members Maureen Berner and Margaret Henderson highlight how one mayor convened local government and community organizations to expand efforts to feed hungry kids during the summer. Over several years, Berner has documented food insecurity in North Carolina through research into the chain of services necessary to feed hungry kids and families, from the farms that donate crops to the non-profit, volunteer-run food banks that distribute the food in communities. For more information about this research, visit www.sog.unc.edu/resources/tools/hunger-research.