You know Your Survival Guy loves New Hampshire. Besides spending a lot of time in the Granite State, New Hampshire topped my 2022 list of Super States. Though Your Survival Guy spends most of his time in the White Mountains, New Hampshire’s south is endowed with one of America’s “best-run cities” in Nashua. According to WalletHub, Nashua is America’s fourth best-run city. Adama McCann writes for WalletHub:
The past year has been a true test of the effectiveness of local leadership. City leaders have had to facilitate the transition from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic back to a state much closer to normal, including loosening restrictions and distributing the vaccine.
Even when the U.S. isn’t dealing with a pandemic, running a city is a tall order. The larger the city, the more complex it becomes to manage. In addition to representing the residents, local leaders must balance the public’s diverse interests with the city’s limited resources. That often means not everyone’s needs can or will be met. Leaders must carefully consider which services are most essential, which agencies’ budgets to cut or boost and whether and how much to raise taxes, among other decisions.
But how do we measure the effectiveness of local leadership? One way is by determining a city’s operating efficiency. In other words, we can learn how well city officials manage and spend public funds by comparing the quality of services residents receive against the city’s total budget.
Using that approach, WalletHub compared the operating efficiency of 150 of the largest U.S. cities to reveal which among them are managed best. We constructed a “Quality of Services” score made up of 38 metrics grouped into six service categories, which we then measured against the city’s per-capita budget.
Overall Rank* City Quality of City Services Total Budget per Capita 1 Nampa, ID 21 1 2 Boise, ID 3 3 3 Fort Wayne, IN 62 2 4 Nashua, NH 9 9 5 Lexington-Fayette, KY 34 6
Nashua joins cities in some of Your Survival Guy’s other Super States at the top of the list. Idaho, which landed in second place on the Super States list for 2022, hosts two of WalletHub’s top five cities.
Action Line: You want to live in states and cities where politicians are good stewards of your tax dollars and you are respected like a customer rather than regarded as a piggy bank from which politicians can withdraw funds. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, and be one of the first to receive my 2023 Super States rankings.
