Washington, DC, USA. Colorado is one of a number of states where state and local governments are prohibited by law from directly providing broadband service, for example, free municipal wireless connections.

So a recommendation in the Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Plan has state officials scrambling.

Released in March, the plan calls for Congress to ensure that state and local governments don’t pose any barriers to making broadband available. If approved, the action could override the state laws.

“The worst thing that could happen in the state of Colorado is for a law like that to be rolled back, and we don't have accompanying policies in place," says John Conley, executive director of the state’s Statewide Internet Portal Authority. To deal with that and other possible federal actions, Colorado has formed a broadband council to review the plan, as well as state policy, and deliver guidance to state lawmakers in the coming year.

Bay St. Louis, MS, USA. One Mississippi governor talks down the damage of the Gulf oil spill. Another has been given the task of managing the cleanup.

The state’s current chief executive, Governor Haley Barbour, has raised his national profile with his optimistic assessment of the spill and his “happy-go-Haley” attitude that earned him a front-page profile in The New York Times Sunday.

Other Republican governors in the region, such as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, have taken Washington to task over the pace of the federal effort.

Barbour stands out for saying the Obama administration has “done more right than wrong,” according to the paper. Instead, he blames the media for relentlessly showing images of oil-drenched birds.

New York, NY, USA. The new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMI) will begin full-scale operations in 2011. It must be inclusive and flexible in developing and implementing payment initiatives.

The CMI should continuously monitor their impact, and rapidly disseminate them if they appear to be successful, in order to realize the potential for improved health care delivery and reduced spending.

This is according to an article by Commonwealth Fund researchers  that appears in the journal Health Affairs. [C1]

In The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Will Be Central to Health Reform's Success, Stuart Guterman, Karen Davis, Kristof Stremikis, and Heather Drake lay out a series of recommendations for the CMI which, as described in the Affordable Care Act, is meant to develop innovative ways of providing and paying for health care that have the potential to reduce costs while preserving or enhancing health care quality.

New York, NY, USA. Like most states, New York collects DNA from those convicted of serious criminal offenses. But Governor David Paterson wants to dramatically expand the practice to include those convicted of almost all offenses, including misdemeanors.

Paterson announced the proposal at a Manhattan press conference last week, flanked by victims’ advocates and representatives from the state’s law enforcement community. Supporters of the plan believe it will help solve and prevent crime, as DNA samples collected at crime scenes can be compared with those in the state’s offender database, leading to suspects.

Critics of the proposal are uneasy over the privacy implications of the state collecting and saving tens of thousands of DNA samples, and they worry that human error — including in busy crime labs — could result in innocent people being accused of new crimes, the (Rochester) Democrat and Chronicle reported.

Washington, DC, USA. States are anxiously watching Congress wrangle over a series of measures they are counting on to help pay for health care, education and unemployment benefits for millions of their residents.

But the federal government’s well-documented financial problems — and the growing attention paid to them on the political campaign trail — are threatening those measures. Critics say the government can’t afford them. Among the top priorities for many states right now is a six-month extension of stimulus funding for Medicaid, the joint state-federal health insurance program for the poor.

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday (May 26) to lobby for extra funding, which he considers essential to balancing the state’s upcoming budget, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: “If the state doesn’t get the additional $850 million in Medicaid assistance, adoption of a 2010-11 budget will become even more difficult than it already is,” the paper says. “Mr. Rendell wants to spend $29.1 billion for the year beginning July 1, which is considerably larger than the current state budget of $27.8 billion.”