the size of the city seemed to have the greatest impact, with smaller cities expressing the greatest needs, and yet clearly having the least amount of resources to meet these needs. These differences, however, tend to be marginal.
Acquiring state-of-the-art training and education for local government personnel is a concern shared by many leaders in the public sector ( Poister and Streib, 1989a and 1989b; Slack, 1990), private-sector consulting firms ( Ammons and Glass, 1988), and universities ( Dunn, Gibson, and Whorton, 1985; Hambrick, 1983). Continual training and education offer a wide variety of opportunities to local government managers, including that of increasing the staff's sense of professionalism ( Wiseman, 1989) and its role in the decision-making process ( Accordino, 1989), as well as its understanding of the political environment ( Lewis and Raffel, 1988).
Even with Clinton's Democratic administration, municipalities will need to continue to search for answers and solutions in sources other than the federal government. Clearly, the message from President Clinton is a change from dependency to self-sufficiency. Municipalities will have to find increased capacity for acquiring additional expertise either from within the ranks of their own work force or from other sources closer to home than Washington.
| Scale | Questionnaire item |
| Information and | Local Government Data Bank |
| Library Utilization | Legislative Histories |
| Local Government Documents/Reports | |
| "How To" /Model Manuals | |
| Professional Journals Books | |
| Federal/State Government Depository | |
| Census Data | |
| Maintenance and | Program Evaluation/Needs |
| Operation Needs | Contract Management |
| Assessment | Public Works / Capital Financing |
| Statistical/Data Analysis | |
| Computer Literacy |
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