State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Let's Make a Pact: States Increasingly Problem Solve Together

Governing: They call them interstate compacts. The idea is for states -- from a handful to all 50 -- to join together contractually to ease a collective load. There are hundreds of these deals and counting, says Colmon Elridge, director of the Council of State Governments’ National Center for Interstate Compacts, which is the primary driving force behind a number of these agreements.

While they may cover diverse state activities such as recognizing each other’s driver’s licenses or medical licenses, they’re not generally well known -- either by the public or within government circles. “Most legislators have no idea their states are in a number of compacts,” says Elridge.

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