Municipal Equation Podcast

With federal requirements (and deadlines ahead) regarding the Americans With Disabilities Act and local government websites, we bring you another important session with Kevin Benson from VC3, this time showing us ways to test our municipal websites for accessibility issues. You should also mark your calendar for the next webinar on the topic, set for Sept. 3, 2026. And check out NCLM's page on ADA accessibility for all the background you need.

Local police department evidence rooms are vital, sensitive places, and a lot rides on managing them well. On this episode, we talk with Hope Martin, evidence manager for the Madison Police Department and board member with the International Association for Property and Evidence, who takes us inside the typical evidence room and runs down the best practices and mentalities for smart, secure management. More about Hope Martin and IAPE: https://welcome.iape.org/2024/02/14/hope-martin/

How do we keep our online systems, and by extension our communities, safe as cyber threats constantly advance and evolve? Yes, we can have all the best security software and so on. But it's also about human behavior, planning and response. On this episode, we talk with NCLM's director of information technology, Sunil Rajan, about the kinds of cyber threats that local governments, vendors and organizations face today, how these threats have evolved, and how to stay ahead of them.

If you're a local elected official, it's important to understand the legal framework of the role and that of the governing board — what you can do, and what you can't, by law -- and it's not always handy, common knowledge. Attorneys at NCLM and in-house with cities and towns across the state specialize in these points, though, and so we've brought NCLM Senior Assistant General Counsel Ben Mount to the podcast to go over the basics and lesser-knowns. Here, we discuss five legal topics we think every elected local official should know in their service. This is a great episode for municipal leaders of all kinds — newly elected and experienced alike. (Mount recently wrote about these five topics in Southern City magazine, which inspired this deeper-look episode.)

Helping your community's young people feel connected with their local government can go a long way, according to multiple local government leaders we talk with on this episode. Gibsonville Mayor Bryant Crisp, Dallas Mayor Hayley Beaty, Albemarle Mayor Pro Tem Martha Sue Hall (NCLM's 2025-26 president) and more share perspectives and personal stories of programs, initiatives and mentoring efforts that link youths and city halls for rippling mutual benefit. The "Mayor For a Day" concept, municipal youth councils and more are in focus here. PLUS: An update on the ADA digital-government deadlines (the subject of Episode 104), which have been pushed back.