Government
Youngstown is governed by a mayor who is elected every four years and limited to a maximum of two terms. Mayors are traditionally inaugurated on or around January 2. The city has tended to elect Democratic mayors since the late 1920s because of the local unions' support for Democratic candidates for office. Youngstown's current mayor is Charles Sammarone, who replaced Jay Williams, the city's first African-American mayor and its first independent mayor since 1922. Williams belonged to the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, a bi-partisan group with the stated goal of "making the public safer by getting illegal guns off the streets". He left his position in Youngstown to become President Barack Obama's auto czar, directing the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry.
Residents elect an eight-member city council composed of representatives of the city's seven wards and a council president. The council, in turn, appoints a city clerk. The council traditionally meets every first and third Wednesday of the month. City council meetings are generally held from the third week in September to the third week in June. Meanwhile, the board of control oversees contracts for public projects within the municipal limits. The Youngstown Police Department and Youngstown Fire Department fall under the board's supervision, as do the parks, civil service, community development, health, planning, and water departments.
Youngstown's finance department oversees all municipal finances and supervises the departments of economic development and income tax. The city's department of public works has sweeping supervisory responsibilities and oversees the departments of engineering, building inspection, building and grounds, signal and sign, demolition and housing, litter and recycling, street, and water waste treatment. The city's law department represents the city on all legal issues, serving as counsel to all municipal departments.
Read more about this topic: Youngstown Metropolitan Area
Famous quotes containing the word government:
“There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation’s public school system entitled “Savage Inequalities,” Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am firmly opposed to the government entering into any business the major purpose of which is competition with our citizens ... for the Federal Government deliberately to go out to build up and expand ... a power and manufacturing business is to break down the initiative and enterprise of the American people; it is the destruction of equality of opportunity amongst our people, it is the negation of the ideals upon which our civilization has been based.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)