Two New ARRA Resources

A new report, Metro Potential in ARRA, published by the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, provides an initial overview of the intent, approach, and content of ARRA from the point of view of metropolitan America.

From that perspective, this policy paper finds that ARRA usefully directs billions of dollars towards significant investments in the four key drivers of prosperity that concentrate in metropolitan areas. At the same time, the paper concludes that ARRA does very little to actively support metropolitan leaders’ efforts to bundle and align ARRA resources to foster local and national recovery. This lack of attention means that the burden of optimizing ARRA’s implementation falls squarely on states, which control significant amounts of ARRA funding, and local and regional actors, who will have a number of opportunities to craft coordinated approaches to implementing the law and sparking recovery.

The Department of Labor has released the Employment and Training Administration's (ETA) initial plans for awarding these "green job training" funds under the Recovery Act so that interested organizations can begin to plan for the application process and can strengthen or build partnerships to be successful applicants.