About

Since the early 1990s, the North Carolina City County Management Association’s (NCCCMA) Civic Education Project has supported the creation and dissemination of Local Government in North Carolina, working with author Dr. Gordon Whitaker. The first edition was published and made available free of charge to classrooms across North Carolina in 1993. Dr. Whitaker updated the text as a second edition in 2003, and again, thanks to funding from the Civic Education Project, the text was made available to classrooms across the state.

In 2009 a third edition was published, with support from NCCCMA and funding from the International City/County Management Association. Unlike previous hard-copy editions, this third edition brought the text into the digital age and was designed for online viewing. In 2012, a fourth online-only edition was published, again with support from NCCCMA. Shortly after the fourth edition was published, Dr. Whitaker retired after 40 years of service at UNC Chapel Hill.

In 2018 the time had come to do another update to the text, and Dr. Whitaker entrusted his colleague at the School of Government, Dr. Rick Morse to take the lead on the effort. Again, with funding support from NCCCMA, the work to update the text commenced with a focus not only on updating content, but also in modernizing the format even more and expanding the scope of the book’s audience.

The fifth edition of Local Government in North Carolina is an interactive textbook that can be used at the K-12 level, by informal learners, adult education programs, and as a supplement for civic education programs such as local government citizens academies. The e-book is enhanced with multimedia features, such as augmented reality, videos, podcast and interactive data charts.