With the holiday season upon us, we at MeriTalk wanted to spread some holiday cheer. We’ve gathered up photos of our furry friends dressed in festive attire, meeting Santa, or just enjoying some winter weather.

As we get ready to break out the champagne flutes and toast to a new year, MeriTalk SLG is taking a look back at the most popular state and local government stories from the past year.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Biden administration’s eviction moratorium this fall, political leaders and housing advocates have scrambled to find ways to keep people in their homes.

In the past two years, state and local government (SLG) leaders have improved their means to produce meaningful data analytics, but they still find themselves struggling to accomplish this as the amount of data collected increases at an exponential rate, according to a new report from MeriTalk.

The Washington State Department of Health (DoH) has launched WA Verify, the state’s new Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record system to help residents prove vaccination status when required.

In a move to simplify the already stressful process of applying to colleges, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) have added all of the state’s public universities onto the Common App platform.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and the Connecticut State Department of Education are launching a new initiative to give high school students a voice in how more than $1.5 million in American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) funds are spent.

Data is one of the most important tools in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Citizens need accurate data to understand the virus and access vaccinations while public health officials need up-to-date information to track COVID-19 and evaluate immunization effectiveness. MeriTalk spoke with Jim Daniel, who leads state and local public health for Amazon Web Services (AWS), to learn how access to public health data has improved and how it may change in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most state and local governments (SLGs) to undergo rapid modernization. For many, modernization has meant adopting a new suite of software services to meet citizen needs as the government shifted to remote work and digital service delivery.

In a bid to improve the user experience, reduce risks, and cut data processing time, the Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor announced that it has migrated its Assessor operations from a paper-based, legacy mainframe environment to the cloud.