Receivership
Definition
Municipal receivership happens when a state declares a city or school district to be in fiscal emergency and appoints an outside manager to take over most or all of its governing decisions, sidelining elected local officials until the crisis is resolved.
Why it matters
Receivership can stabilize a government's finances, but it also removes voters' ability to hold anyone accountable at the ballot box, since the person making decisions was appointed by the state, not elected locally. About 19 states have some form of takeover law, and how it gets triggered has drawn scrutiny for falling disproportionately on lower-income and majority-Black cities.
Seen in the wild
Flint, Michigan was under the control of state-appointed emergency managers when the city switched its water source in 2014, a decision made without full local council authority that led directly to the Flint water crisis, one of the most widely documented cases of emergency management failure in the U.S.1