Where Are American Rescue Plan Funds Going?

Alan Berube, Peter Frosch, and Allison Bell of Brookings describe two useful tools for tracking local government distribution of State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF), aprt of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker “tracks data on SLFRF-supported projects in more than 300 large cities and counties around the country.” The MSP ARPA Tracker focuses on the same data in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

“Our organizations have used these tools to assess the rate at which local governments are committing SLFRF dollars to specific projects, the broad spending priorities they are identifying, and how these vary across cities and counties and by jurisdiction size.”

The tools are designed to inform decisionmaking in three main ways: “Increasing government transparency,” “Enhancing regional focus and collaboration,” and “Adding up investments to chart longer-run impact.” The authors hope that increasing transparency with clear, easy-to-use tools can help cities and counties collaborate, coordinate efforts, and track their success—or lack thereof—to better plan for future investments.

For example, the Twin Cities region committed close to three times the average amount to housing for low-income residents, in part because of “long-standing efforts by GREATER MSP and its partners to highlight mounting affordable housing pressures and create relationships and vehicles that could begin to address those challenges at scale.” Additionally, “For local leaders who hope to make the case for future flexible federal aid in times of economic crisis, leveraging these data can build a valuable evidence base.”