Atlanta, GA, USA. Volunteering in state parks has long been a staple of the Boy Scouts experience. But in Georgia this year, as the Boy Scouts celebrate their 100th anniversary by building bridges and park benches, maintaining trails and cleaning up waterways, the ongoing event is unusual in one respect.

It’s sponsored by Verizon Wireless.

Verizon provides funding for tools and supplies as the scouts perform service projects around the state. Georgia recognizes Verizon Wireless in publicity materials and on the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Web site.

The partnership is among the first steps in a broader strategy Georgia is taking to seek corporate sponsorships in its state parks. The Department of Natural Resources has contracted with a marketing firm to evaluate parks-related assets that might create sponsorship opportunities, and to help the agency pursue them. Those could include more programmatic sponsorships like the one with Verizon, or putting advertisements on everything from boat ramps to park signs.

Des Moines, IA, USA. For a few months next year, Ed Cook, a lawyer with the Iowa General Assembly’s bill-writing agency, will turn his attention from drafting legislation to drawing maps.

Cook and a handful of his colleagues will hole themselves up in a hidden, locked room in the state’s Capitol complex.

A few weeks later, members of the bill-writing agency will emerge with a set of maps that will help determine the makeup of Congress and the state Legislature for the next decade.

Iowa is the only state to give nonpartisan staff so much control over the legislative redistricting process. In most states, redistricting is a political bloodsport, with Democrats and Republicans fighting to jigger district lines for partisan advantages, as well as individual job security. In Iowa, the job is chiefly the responsibility of just three people, although many others contribute.

Trenton, NJ, USA. The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission makes a compelling case about why it is important for the state’s drivers to have their cars inspected for safety every two years.

“Even the most conscientious person behind the wheel can be an unsafe driver if he heads out on the road with bad brakes, bald tires or one of a hundred other safety problems,” the agency says on a state website, njinspections.com. “That’s a big reason why New Jersey has one of the strictest auto inspections in the nation. We’re absolutely committed to keeping you, your family and everyone who shares our roads as safe as possible.”

Despite what the site may say now, New Jersey’s auto inspection program became a lot less strict last week. To save $17 million a year, the Motor Vehicle Commission did away with biennial safety inspections for private cars. That means it is now up to New Jersey residents themselves to identify and repair bad brakes, cracked windshields, broken turn signals, steering problems and a range of other mechanical failures, a Motor Vehicle Commission spokesman, Mike Horan, told Stateline.

Washington, DC, USA. California may be the poster child of state fiscal problems, but it pays legislators far more than any other state, according to a new survey of lawmakers’ compensation by the Illinois Policy Institute.

The survey found that California lawmakers earn $95,291 a year. That’s $15,000 more than lawmakers in Michigan, the next highest-paying state.

And it comes despite a budget shortfall that in the 2010 fiscal year amounted to 65 percent of California’s overall budget, according to an estimate that was included in the survey.

The institute’s report focuses mainly on Illinois — noting, for example, that Illinois legislators earn 47 percent more each year than the average state resident does, even as the state faces some of the most severe budget problems in the nation. But the study also provides a good national perspective of just how broad the spectrum of state legislative salaries is.

Boston, MA, USA. Millions of acres in the western U.S. are owned by states that then lease them to cattle ranchers to generate revenue for schools. “School sections,” as the federal Bureau of Land Management calls them, were set aside by acts of Congress to encourage K-12 and college education.

Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal recently said while touring Grand Teton National Park that he would like to sell two square miles of school sections within the mountain park to private developers, which could fetch an estimated $125 million for education compared to the paltry $3,000-a-year the state earns now on the land from ranchers who lease it.

The idea of selling off part of one of America’s most revered national parks drew immediate attention from federal officials and conservation groups, which was the whole point. Freudenthal, a popular Democrat in his last year in office, wants to nudge federal officials to make a deal with Wyoming to swap the Grand Teton parcels for cash or federal land of equal value elsewhere in the state. Officials are appraising the property this month; it was valued at about $100 million in 2004.