Regional Leadership
California Forward is exploring ways civic, business, government and community leaders can agree on strategies to improve quality of life in their region
The Latest: Please stand with us. Go to www.cafwd-action.org to help show the politicians in Sacramento that Californians are demanding real change.
Government agencies - cities and counties, law enforcement and education - are not able to share resources and authority to solve problems they cannot solve on their own. While the state must always play a leadership role, the precise solutions need to be crafted and managed at the regional level.
California has at least nine distinct regional economies – with different workforce and other input needs, different time and technological horizons, different markets and modes of transportation, different demands on infrastructure and environmental concerns.
By empowering regional decision-making, California has the opportunity to work at a scale where there is greater potential for political agreement, and for building strategies that reduce persistent poverty, benefit working families, encourage businesses to invest capital and generate jobs and ensure natural resources are managed and used in sustainable and healthy ways.
Download Regional Partnerships: A Path to Prosperity for more information about regional governance as one path to redefining the dysfunctional state-local relationship.
The California Forward 2010 Reform Principles remove barriers to local government coordination. They encourage community-level governments to coordinate, consolidate districts when this makes sense, and give county governments authority to redistribute local property taxes to improve efficiency, improve services and deliver better results.
Our principles also foster and fund long-term regional collaboration. They allows cities, counties and school officials who craft long-term flexible plans to address community needs, to seek majority-vote approval to provide funds to pay for them, while retaining the vote thresholds established under Proposition 218.
For more information about The California Forward 2010 Reform Principles, click here.
California Forward also has proposed a California Partnership for Regional Economies as a mechanism to efficiently and responsively support the development of regional collaborative efforts and align state-level policies to the needs of regional economies.
Please stand with us. Go to www.cafwd-action.org to help show the politicians in Sacramento that Californians are demanding real change.
Regional Partnerships: A Path to Prosperity
The California Partnership for Regional Economies Fact Sheet
