Report Assesses Regional Possibilities in Recovery Act
by Bill Barnes
A new paper from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program finds that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is limited in its support for creative regional implementation, but that it delivers critical investments and holds out significant opportunity for regional and metropolitan empowerment and problem-solving.
To produce real prosperity, the paper argues, local leaders require ways to enhance the fundamental “drivers” of productive growth — innovation, infrastructure, human capital, and quality places. But metropolitan actors also need the discretion and power to aggregate, link, and coordinate those drivers to maximize their impact.
The paper finds that ARRA usefully directs billions of dollars towards significant investments in the four key drivers of prosperity. At the same time, the paper concludes that ARRA does very little to actively support efforts to bundle and align ARRA resources to foster local, regional and national recovery.
The report finds that:
The need for fast action created a bias towards “business-as-usual” delivery systems in the crafting of ARRA. That orientation limits the extent to which the Recovery Act actively supports metropolitan-area implementation.
And yet, despite its flaws, ARRA delivers critical investments in what matters. In this respect, Brookings estimates that nearly 43 percent — roughly $335 billion — of the total stimulus appropriation supports the main drivers of prosperity: innovation, human capital, infrastructure and quality places.
In addition, the report says that ARRA holds out significant opportunities for creative leaders to engage in coordinated, regional problem solving. The Recovery Act provides some important chances for linking resources and even for transformative governance. ARRA provides a number of avenues for coordinating its various funding streams at a metropolitan level, particularly in new competitive grant programs. A few of the relevant provisions include:
• The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E): A $400 million appropriation for cutting-edge energy research and development will require collaboration among private firms, universities, labs and research institutes that could seed the sort of cross-institutional partnerships that facilitate continued, regional innovation and economic growth.
• Worker training in high-growth and emerging industries: A $750 million appropriation for connecting workforce development to competitive industry sectors could spur regional approaches to supporting high-value clusters, especially around energy efficiency and renewable energy. • Multimodal transportation: Some $1.5 billion will fund competitive grants to support nationally, regionally, or metro-significant projects that may facilitate linking transportation, housing, energy and environmental concerns.
• Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants: ARRA provides $3.2 billion in tremendously flexible grants that could motivate metro-scale strategies for reducing fossil fuel emissions and promoting energy efficiency in transportation, building and other sectors. • The Neighborhood Stabilization Program: $2 billion is available to address the secondary, community impacts of the foreclosure crisis and may lead to metro-wide partnerships between state and local governments, nonprofits and private entities
Some elements of ARRA, according to the report, truly do represent the sort of transformative policymaking that can strengthen all levels of governance and kindle truly regional and metropolitan action. For example:
• On energy retrofits: An effort by the Departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development to leverage some $16 billion in ARRA funds could spark a major private retrofit market in U.S. regions. This effort will contribute to the emergence of an industry that could provide jobs and spark the economy in some of the oldest areas. Moreover, Brookings says, the initiative will strike a blow for integrated policymaking by stepping beyond the sort of silo-driven policy that so often frustrates innovation.
• On education innovation: A $650 million Department of Education competitive grant program to local school districts, or partnerships between local districts and nonprofit organizations, could stimulate the expansion of high-performance charter management organizations and increase the local supply of highly effective teachers to staff those and other high-needs schools.
"Metro Potential in ARRA: A Preliminary Assessment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act from a Metropolitan Perspective" — both the full report and an executive summary — is available on the Brookings Metro Studies website, www.brookings.edu/metro.aspx.
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