The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program has published on its website a new series of resources titled “Implementing ARRA” which tracks the implementation work of metropolitan leaders, assessing their progress and struggles, and extracting from the innovators’ experiences ideas for short- and long-term federal policy reforms. The series will serve as a resource for best-practice exchange among regions and a source of ideas for designing the next generation of metro-friendly federal policies. Resources include:
- Implementing ARRA: Innovations in Design in Metro America. In this framing paper, Mark Muro, Sarah Rahman and Amy Liu highlight the work of some of the most creative recovery act implementers in metropolitan America, noting that their efforts to innovate come against the grain of federal “business-as-usual.”
- Guiding State Stimulus Spending: The Bay Area’s Economic Recovery Workplan. A Bay Area economic development nonprofit selected among hundreds of proposals to craft a single ARRA implementation strategy that creates jobs in the short-term and lays the foundation for economic growth and competitiveness in the long-term.
- Coordinating Energy Efficiency Region-Wide: The Chicago-Area’s Building Energy Efficiency System. A regional nonprofit plans on using ARRA funds to boost its current retrofit and weatherization activities in the short-term while promoting greater regional cooperation and expanded services in the long-term.
- Expanding Retrofits With Private Financing: Chicago’s Multi-Family Energy Retrofit Program. The city of Chicago is using ARRA funds to introduce a new program for retrofit delivery that relies on private sector financing and energy service companies to target property owners of lower-income multi-family homes.
- Coordinating Inter-Suburban Recovery: ARRA Initiatives Across Chicago’s Southern Suburbs. A group of 40 struggling Chicago-area suburbs are utilizing a pre-existing multi-jurisdictional neighborhood stabilization strategy as a framework for linking multiple ARRA funding flows to support community development, energy efficiency and infrastructure upgrades.
- Linking Green Recovery Goals: Integrated ARRA Initiatives in Greater Flagstaff. Flagstaff and Coconino County, AZ are working together on ways to reduce the communities’ high utility costs by using ARRA money to jump-start a drive to retrofit low-income households’ homes while drawing on newly trained local workers.
- Targeting ARRA for Neighborhood Uplift: Kansas City’s Green Impact Zone. This comprehensive plan to address a struggling 150-block urban zone in Kansas City utilizes multiple ARRA funds and other resources to train and employ the jobless to perform various energy-efficient and green infrastructure projects in the area.
- Advancing Joint City-County Recovery: The Memphis Blueprint for a City of Choice. The city of Memphis and Shelby County, TN along with local business leaders have developed a blueprint to transform the core city into a choice place for living and working by investing ARRA dollars and other funding sources into human capital, government efficiency and economic growth.
- Scaling Up for Regional Sustainability: Puget Sound New Energy Solutions. Using ARRA funds in the short-term to seed a long-term initiative, a consortium of cities, counties, and local utilities in the Puget Sound area have banded together to advance innovative sustainability solutions in that region.
- Facilitating Regional Stimulus Applications: Puget Sound’s ARRA Coordination. Seeking to bring together potential regional partners and coordinate requests for ARRA funding, the Puget Sound Regional Council has launched an online clearinghouse, message board and blog, as well as bi-weekly meetings, to inform area leaders about ARRA programs and process and opportunities for collaboration.
- Partnering for Citywide Retrofits: Seattle’s Green Building Capital Initiative. Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment will put ARRA funds to work providing home energy efficiency audits and retrofit financing, in partnership with regional utilities and area nonprofits.
- Strategically Selecting Stimulus Transit Projects: The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s Structured Prioritization Process. To select the most high-impact, ready-to-go projects for stimulus funding, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority conducted a new, agency-wide structured process that will also serve as the framework for future capital needs decisions.
- Metro Potential in ARRA: An Early Assessment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. America’s national economic crisis is also a metropolitan crisis, because metropolitan areas are the true engines of the national economy. So it matters intensely how well the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) empowers metropolitan leaders to boost prosperity. This paper finds that although ARRA is limited in its support for creative metropolitan-area implementation, it delivers critical investments in what matters to metros and holds out significant opportunity for metropolitan empowerment and problem-solving.
