The preservation of federal priorities connecticut and the cdbg small cities program
This article examines the impact of state assumption of federal grant programs on the state of Connecticut. The administrative process created by Connecticut to implement the Small Cities CDBG program is examined and followed by a comparison of programmatic activities before and after state assumption. Unlike many other states, Connecticut adopted priorities similar to those of the federal government. Connecticut's preservation of federal priorties is most likely due to the choice of state implementing agency and a unique policy bias at the state level.
Decentralization, Redistribution and Community Development: A Reassessment of the Small Cities CDBG Program
The proper balance between federal initiative and state control in policy administration has always been a volatile issue in American politics. The Reagan admin­ istration is actively pursuing a program that it hopes will reduce the size and scope of the national government, decentralize program and policy administration, and revitalize state government. I An initial step toward decentralization came with the Omnibus Budget Recon­ ciliation Act of 1981 (OBRA81), which consolidated more than 50 categorical grants into nine block grants. Under the block grant approach, most of these grant programs will now be under administrative control of state governments rather than federal agencies. While the administrative direction of the Reagan approach is clear, the policy implications have yet to be systematically analyzed. This paper is an analysis of changes in one particular block grant altered by OBRA81, the small cities portion of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. Following Morgan and England's recent article in PAR,2 we are primarily concerned with the question of redistribution. Particular attention is focused on the proposition that decentralization weakens the redistributive character of policy allocation. The specific empirical question addressed is: have shifts in funding priorities developed with the change from Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to state administration of the small cities program? We also analyze the use of single purpose and multipurpose grants by both HUD and the states. Finally, changes are assessed within the context of CDBG as a developing state program. The data consist of cross-sectional samples of states admin­ istering the program for one or two years.
Problems of a centralised department in a decentralised mental hospital.
Abstract This paper deals with some of the issues and problems which arose in a state mental hospital, when in the course of becoming a more community-oriented facility, the hospital decentralized its clinical structure into geographically-based treatment units while retaining a centralized nursing department administration. The effects of unitization and a subsequent attempt to reoganize the nursing department on both the character of professional roles and the integration of parts of the hospital are discussed within the context of an open-systems conceptual model of hospital organization.