Beacon Hill legislators have less than two weeks to decide how to spend more than $3 billion dollars of federal pandemic aid from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, before their next recess. The Massachusetts Municipal Association, a nonprofit organization that brings together the Bay State’s towns and cities, is pushing state leaders to “make sure that these funds will be for initiatives that cities and towns can actually access, such as climate mitigation or housing affordability, or local economic development or health disparities,” said MMA executive director Geoff Beckwith.
Beckwith said that, while municipalities wait for state legislators to allocate funds, they’re also watching Capitol Hill to see what more may be coming their way as Congress wrestles with President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill and his $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package.
All that is happening while Massachusetts cities and towns deliberately and carefully try to figure out the best way to spend federal money they’re receiving directly — money Beckwith called “transformative.” The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
GBH News’ Mark Herz: Tell us first how much ARPA funds our municipalities have or will have in their bank accounts.
Geoff Beckwith: The American Rescue Plan Act, ARPA, has provided an unprecedented amount of funding and resources to cities and towns — the numbers flowing into Massachusetts are pretty staggering. Our cities and towns are receiving over $3 billion at varying levels: the 38 communities that have 50,000 in population or more are getting $1.7 billion. And then all the other communities, 313 smaller cities and towns, are getting almost $400 million.
Plus, almost all of our communities are getting most, if not all, of the funds that would go to counties in Massachusetts, since most counties don't even exist [as government entities] in the state. So, our cities and towns have received about half of that money from the federal government, that's about $1.5 billion.
But they're not actually suddenly going out there willy-nilly and spending the funds. What they're doing is engaging in a really thoughtful and responsible planning and engagement process. So they use this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make investments that will build a strong recovery, and provide lasting benefits for all of our residents
Herz: How big are the amounts for just one city or town, and what can that kind of money do?
Beckwith: A community of about 25,000 would be getting somewhere around $7-9 million that they could use in a number of categories of spending. Plus they're hoping to be able to access some of what the state is doing with their federal ARPA monies as well. We're talking about an infusion of funds that communities have multiple years to spend — they don't have to all be spent immediately.
And for a lot of these funds, they could be used for important capital projects — to make our water and sewer systems more resilient, or to address the digital divide and lack of broadband for many residents. And that takes planning, procurement and build-out — and whole projects.
And the federal government recognized that, and that's why communities have time to plan, then time to deploy the money.
Even though there's a great sense of urgency, because we're still in the, we hope, end stages of the pandemic, we want to be able to move forward with as much certainty as possible about the best ways to invest in and grow our economy, and recover in a way that addresses a lot of the disparities that were uncovered by the pandemic as well.
Herz: So I'm thinking of Boston, and gateway cities like Brockton and Chelsea and Lawrence and Lowell. How can these funds really make a difference when it comes to disparities and inequities?
Beckwith: Well, this is part of the reason why it's taking a little bit of time. And it's good for communities to to do that kind of planning and engagement, to try and build consensus about the most impactful ways to invest.
Some of the communities you just mentioned are among those metropolitan cities, that are called essentially "entitlement communities," because they've been a direct recipients of federal monies in the past through the Community Development Block grant program.
They're getting substantially more money, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars. This is once-in-a-generation funding.
Where a non-metropolitan municipality might be getting $7 or $8 million, a metropolitan city might be getting $30 or $40 or $50 million. And many of those cities are the ones that were most disproportionately impacted because they may be larger economic centers with a significant amount of economic diversity — that means folks who have been either essential workers, or populations that were hit harder by the pandemic and maybe were further behind economically even beforehand.
So these communities are looking at the best ways to try to address those disparities, either in public health and public health access and outcomes, or in housing affordability, or in working to make investments in those neighborhoods so that those regions are more pandemic resilient.
There are lots of of ways in which the funds could be invested — for example, also in workforce training, in skill building — so that individuals who have been underemployed might get those skills to be part of the new-wave economy.
And so they're looking at all of those programs, but it's also more complicated. And that's because the federal government is still writing the rules for how these funds can be spent.
So it's still pretty confusing out there for communities as they're seeking clarity. For example, how exactly can we do workforce training and make sure it's an eligible use? How exactly can we do investment in parks and make sure it's eligible? How can we do investments in improving public health access for all of the people in our city or our town and make sure it's eligible as those rules are still being written? And so that's one of the reasons why it's taking longer.
Herz: And what’s the connection to what lawmakers in Washington, D.C., are working on, and also what our state lawmakers are working on here?
Beckwith: Gov. Charlie Baker and the state legislature are now making decisions about how to spend billions of dollars of federal funds. Pending before the state House and the Senate is legislation that would allocate about half of those funds to important programs.
And so local officials are waiting to see what the state decision is going to be in terms of deploying the state's federal ARPA funds because communities don't want to duplicate, but they do want to leverage those funds, and have what they're planning go even farther and be more impactful locally.
And also federally, there are big bills that are still pending. And again, communities don't want to miss opportunities to leverage those funds. And they don't want to spend their ARPA funds and have them simply duplicate what they might be able to access in another program. So that adds opportunity, but it also slows down the process as well. And that's all being integrated together.
Look, local officials are looking for clarity — and what that means is communities are being rightfully careful, thoughtful; and they're really building consensus locally. And that's the reason why the process is taking longer, I think, than people had imagined. It's not a snap-your-fingers process. This is really about making decisions that will bring benefits for years to come.
