Traveling the Stimulus Road
Federal dollars come through formulas, competitive grants.
The city of Baytown quickly received about $2 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but it wants more.
“It’s been beneficial in a couple of relatively minor ways — a million here, a million there,” says City Manager Garry Brumback. “The frustration in our minds was the concept of ‘shovel-ready’ projects.”
Like many other local governments, Baytown received its first federal stimulus money almost without asking. Additional money flowed through existing programs such as the federal housing department’s Community Development Block Grants and the U.S. Department of Energy’s conservation programs.
Local Government Tools that Made the Difference
Where to Start?
Many local government officials say they don’t know where to start looking for federal stimulus dollars to patch their budgets.
“There is a giant group of folks in a kind of vapor-lock,” says Texas-based consultant John Miri. “They don’t know how to move forward.”
The Web site for the Government Finance Officers Association is a good place to start. It explains how to tap into stimulus dollars and provides links to most national and state organizations for cities, counties and school districts, as well as some federal sites.
The Texas Comptroller’s office offers a chart of state and federal grants, as well as contact information, at its stimulus Web site.
Baytown also received money for police equipment without competing for it.
“We just had to express an interest,” Brumback says of his grant application to the Governor’s office.
Coveted transportation dollars proved harder to come by because Baytown, which has a fiscal 2009 budget of $110 million, didn’t have shovel-ready projects on the drawing board.
“Nobody our size can afford to have design and engineering done unless they have the money for the project,” Brumback says. “To spend $500,000 to design a $10 million project without the $10 million in hand is not really prudent.”
Brumback is not deterred.
He says Baytown is focused on transportation, water and sewer projects. He says the city hired a lobbyist who proved invaluable in dealing with Congress and the federal bureaucracy.
“It’s good just having a map of where the money is and who we should talk to,” Brumback says.
The $787 billion federal stimulus package represents about 6 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, says Steven Jennings, Harris County’s chief information officer. But he estimates that only about $280 billion is available to state and local governments. The remainder goes to tax cuts, greater unemployment benefits and other assistance.
Jennings likens the local governments’ pursuit of stimulus funds to fishing in different buckets of money while watching out for strings that might be attached.
“Stimulus is grants,” Jennings says. “For people who do grants every day, they know the buckets and the strings.”
Jennings says officials should be careful if they have to add staff because of a stimulus project.
“The money looks good right now,” he says. “But what are you going to do with the staff after the grant expires?”
Another issue for local officials to consider is the recovery act’s increased reporting requirements. The emphasis on transparency will add work for a local staff tracking how a grant is spent.
John Miri with the Center for Digital Government, a technology think tank, says that shouldn’t stop someone from applying. He predicted that the recovery act’s greater reporting requirements will be applied to all federal grants eventually.
“They will move that microscope over to other federal spending,” he says.
Each federal grant has a different deadline for applying. In some instances, the agencies are still writing rules. Others are already awarding money.
Going forward, local governments will be competing more and more for the remaining stimulus dollars.
“The reality is, there’s a lot of new money,” says Miri. “But there’s also a lot of competition.” TR
Read Laylan Copelin’s “On The Money” column keeping a Texas eye on the stimulus dollars.
