Keynote Speaker - Recession Impacts on US, NZ and Australia

The main program of Thursday afternoon was the keynote address by ICMA Executive Director Bob O'Neill talking about the US recession and its impacts on local governments. Since the main audience of this blog is in the USA and have been living through this, let me leave what Bob talked about for later in this post. I want to focus on the comments of the Presidents of New Zealand and Australia city manager associations said in response to Bob's comments at the conclusion of his remarks.

In short, things have been OK in both countries. In Australia, Neil Hartley the President of the Australia group said that things were fine the last few years but were tightening a little bit now. Australia had a national government stimulus package which Hartley indicated helped matters and that the banking industry in Australia is much more regulated than the US banking industrty was and is.

However in New Zealand, SOLGM President Steve Parry said that all remained well economically in the country. There was no national government stimulus package. Parry attributed the fiscal health to a healthy banking industry (most NZ banks are part of Australian banks), robust trade with Asian partners and that the national government continues to borrow money to support current operations. Parry said that there is some concern here how much longer this borrowing can still be done on the national level. All very interesting.

Bob O'Neill's talk focused on the research that ICMA has done in the past few years working with the Alliance for Innovation on ways US local governments are dealing with the recession. This work is compiled together on ICMA's economic crisis webpage. Bob also mentioned a wiki that is hosted by the Alliance that goes into the specific areas that local government managers can take advantage of the crisis to improve the organizations. These areas include:

What are the dimensions of the current crisis? What defines it?
What has worked in previous fiscal cutback efforts?
What characterizes organizations that cope better with fiscal stress?
Why is innovation in hard times so critical but how can positive actions be taken?
How can local government action contribute to the economic recovery?

Overall an excellent keynote session.