If you think the Obama administration’s $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is just one big government boondoggle, check out some top regional implementation strategies.
Kansas City, Mo., for example. A big infusion the stimulus funds is being focused on a newly dubbed “Green Impact Zone,” a 150-block area of the inner city long plagued by poverty, violence, abandonment and joblessness.
The goal’s nothing less than turning around every negative indicator in an area that’s long been a glaring exception to the Kansas City region’s general prosperity–notwithstanding its proximity to major roads and a major health sciences cluster.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) of Kansas City gets credit for conceiving the Green Impact Zone idea. But the entire metropolitan region stepped in–the Mid-America Regional Council, city departments, neighborhood groups, community development organizations, employment and energy non-profits and others.
Their agenda runs from weatherizing every home that needs it to a bus rapid transit system, community policing to a home-by-home outreach including job training and placement.
The Kansas City story is not unique. California’s Business, Transportation and Housing Agency invited all 12 regions of the state to propose ways to spend stimulus funds most effectively. The star responder was the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, which mapped ways to connect the monies to advance the region’s 21st century goals, ranging from transportation and water security to workforce development.
All of the Bay Area’s nine counties and 101 cities came onboard, with mayors, county supervisors, business leaders and legislative delegations in Sacramento offering input. Proposals include a new stem-cell research facility, full conversion to LED streetlights, even ways to integrate electric vehicles with the power grid.
The Kansas City and Bay Area regions aren’t alone. The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has been able to identify several others–among them Memphis, Chicago, even smaller areas like Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Flagstaff, Ariz.–where regions have “gotten their act together” to connect dots and make ARRA funds serve cohesive areawide agendas.
Normally regions wouldn’t have the funds for such far-reaching–and one could argue historically long-delayed–initiatives. Which is why the Recovery Act offered such a rare opportunity. Understandably, people are judging the stimulus legislation–celebrating its six-month anniversary this month–on jobs it’s created. Estimates are running as high as 1 million, a serious anti-recession move.
But couldn’t–and shouldn’t–this massive outlay of monies go much further? Couldn’t it also be a big incentive to all 366 U.S. metro regions–where 83 percent of us live–to break out of rigid federal grant-in-aid channels? Couldn’t it help bypass the inflexible formulas that so often stand in the way of smart metro-scale action? Why not aim for truly “transformative” alliances and programs instead?
That’s the question senior Brookings analyst Mark Muro and his colleagues posed. Yet sadly, their nationwide survey didn’t find very many “stars.” And where they did–as in such regions as Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City and the Bay Area–there was often a regional vision, with strong government-private sector leadership, well before the current economic crisis.
This dictates a big lessons for regions nationwide: Don’t wait for a crisis. Get your top government, business, neighborhood and environmental leaders to the table early and often on joint projects. Then, when there is fresh national money, you’re able to respond quickly, effectively. The worst idea is to leave your key players–government leaders, housing and transportation officials, schools and universities, your chambers of commerce and citizen groups–in their own foxholes, isolated and lagging in forging inventive strategies for this ultra-challenging century.
But there’s a message for Washington and state governments, too: It’s a mistake–even when you want to see recovery money spent fast–to mindlessly pump out funds through existing federal-state-local spending mechanisms and formulas. Speed too easily becomes the enemy of reinvention: it eclipses the chances to engage metro regions and combine resources on the ground for meaningful, and long-term, economic recovery.
The Brookings researchers also warn that the White House and Cabinet agencies need to take the job of promoting state, regional and local innovation in using Recovery Act funds much more seriously. The idea should be to encourage mutually reinforcing projects and to highlight exemplary state-regional-local innovation through presidential statements–perhaps even a blunt Office of Management and Budget directive to all federal agencies.
Right now, they report, some federal programs–for example the new energy efficiency and conservation block grants–are allowing lots of local flexibility, and positive results. But the federal government’s separate weatherization program is so rigid, stuck in details like the types of eligible buildings, that localities, contends Muro, have to “turn themselves inside out” to try to access it.
Will we Americans, with our tangled federal system, be smart enough to make these changes? Tradition says no. The pressing need for a sounder national future says yes.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.
For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.
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By Lauren Mann on Nov 9, 2009 12:52:33 AM
It's encouraging that some metropolitan areas are using the stimulus money wisely and transforming it into economic improvement. It's equally crucial, however, that our politicians cut costs wherever possible. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors should follow the example set by their counterparts in the Bay Area. Instead, they are doing nothing to mitigate the economic stress the area is suffering through.
Last year, the L.A. County Department of Public Social Services procured for vendor services to operate the county's GAIN case management services (essentially a welfare to work program). Two bids came in from the incumbent company (Maximus, Inc.) and Policy Studies Inc. (PSI). The two companies were scored by a neutral third party, and PSI beat Maximus solidly in several categories, including performance and bid price. Maximus protested, but the findings were upheld on 3 levels and PSI was recommended by DPSS to receive the contract.
The Board of Supervisors disagreed. They rejected the recommendation with 3 votes. They claimed the process of consensus scoring somehow concealed bias from the DPSS, though no specific evidence of this bias was ever presented. Furthermore, this scoring process was documented as a valid process which had been used for years prior to 2008, and the same process whereby the incumbent Maximus had been recommended and awarded. The BOS then directed the DPSS to extend Maximus' contract for 6 months while they reissue the RFP and devise a new scoring method.
The BOS also expressed some superficial concern that the cost of the contract may exceed county requirements (see County Prop A). Although language could've easily been built into the contract to ensure cost neutrality/savings, the BOS rejected that argument and asked DPSS to review their contract monitoring costs for possible reductions and eliminate or reduce pay for performance provisions that could drive up the overall contract cost should the vendor outperform expectations.
The reissue of this RFP makes no fiscal sense whatsoever, particularly given the dire state of California's economy. What's more, the state faces federal penalties to the tune of approximately $185 million if they do not meet a preexisting federal threshold. Why is the BOS insisting on spending MORE of our tax dollars in an effort to maintain their business relationship with Maximus - a company whose performance was scored lower and contract priced higher than PSI? (The county has estimated the cost to reissue the RFP to be $250,000). If PSI had been chosen, their contract would save the county over one million dollars annually. What's going on here?
An LA Times article from last year exposed just how entangled Maximus is with the BOS. In the first half of 2008, Maximus spent over $124,000 on two lobbying firms, more than doubling what they spent on marketing in the past year. Perhaps even more troubling, Maximus donated $1,000 (the maximum allowed) to the campaigns to re-elect supervisors Don Knabe and Michael D. Antonovich. They even gave $1,000 to two members whose terms had 2 years left to run.
In these lean times, something else must be motivating the board's decisions, because it's certainly not the bottom line.
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