How Cities and Counties are Putting American Rescue Plan Dollars to Work.

As the COVID-19 economic and public health emergencies slowly abate, local leaders nationwide are adjusting to a reality in which—at least in the short term—they have significant resources to address both acute and long-standing challenges. Many of those resources are flowing to cities and counties via the American Rescue Plan Act’s (ARPA) flexible State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF).

Our three organizations—the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, and Brookings Metro—are tracking how cities and counties are using these flexible funds via our Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker. The latest data, which jurisdictions submitted to the Treasury Department for activity through December 31, 2021, reflects decisions that cities and counties made in the seven months after receiving their first tranche of SLFRF dollars. This data comes from 89 cities and 240 counties that have at least 250,000 residents; they are required to make frequent reports to Treasury on how they are deploying the funds.

ARPA permits SLFRF recipients to use the dollars to address a wide range of needs in response to the pandemic and its impacts. As of the end of 2021, those 329 jurisdictions had identified more than 4,500 discrete projects for which they had budgeted at least a portion of their flexible funds. Our organizations analyzed the project data, including (as we described in February 2022) “coding” each project into one of seven overall spending groups (community aid; economic and workforce development; government operations; housing; infrastructure; public health; and public safety), and then into 41 spending sub-groups that provide further detail on the use of the funds. In this piece, we identify four key takeaways about city and county priorities from the new data.

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The Brookings Institution

by Alan Berube, Teryn Zmuda, and Christine Baker-Smith

Tuesday, July 12, 2022



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