Mayor Emmett Jordan, Mayor Pro Tem Kristen Weaver, and Council Members Colin Byrd, Judith Davis, Ric Gordon, Silke Pope, and Rodney Roberts; Acting City Manager Tim George; Greenbelt CARES Director Liz Park; Greenbelt Human Resources Director and GARE Coordinator Dawane Martinez,
March 16, 2022
Recognition
We appreciate the city’s quick response to allocate $1.4 million from its share of the American Rescue Plan Act funds to help prevent evictions, address food insecurity, and provide lifelines to local businesses through the Greenbelt Business Improvement Fund.
And we applaud the Council’s considerate approach in using multiple channels to gather public feedback from Greenbelt residents on how the ARPA funds can best be spent.
Need for Clear Equity Goals
We ask the Greenbelt City Council to allocate by 2024 a total of at least 50% of Greenbelt’s ARPA funds ($11.4 million) to directly address worsening racial disparities from the pandemic, especially for those in poverty, who are disproportionately People of Color. In other words, we would like to see at least $11.4 million in total spent on Treasury reporting categories for Services to Disproportionately Impacted Communities, Negative Economic Impacts (Assistance to Households), and Public Health, through programs and services for those in our community affected the most by the pandemic.
Without clear equity goals, we are concerned that the City will be tempted to move most funds in easier-to-manage directions like revenue recovery, water and sewer capital projects, and public safety, where fiscal frameworks already exist.
The city has no comprehensive approach to identifying racial disparities and addressing the roots of poverty here. Compiling metrics and developing new programs to address disparities will require developing new fiscal and public service frameworks. This will be hard work, and we encourage Council to make the reduction of worsening racial disparities from the pandemic a clear priority.
Need to Continue Timely Response
We appreciate and support Council’s intention to give residents ample time to offer feedback on the best use of ARPA funds. We look forward to using multiple channels to make ongoing comments and to see what other residents are recommending.
We also note that people in poverty in Greenbelt need immediate help in many areas including employment, housing, food and nutrition, health care, child care, education, and transportation. We strongly encourage the city to immediately begin making assessments on where need is greatest. Gathering current metrics on how poverty has worsened through the pandemic will be a new direction for Greenbelt and a critical step for responsibly using ARPA funds to meet ongoing emergency needs.
Thus we ask Council to balance immediate need with caution and make $3 to $5 million available as soon as possible to supplement the funds that were quickly dispersed in the last few months.
Further Discussion
We provide more discussion and information on our website at Greenbelt ARPA Funds. We are especially interested in seeing funds used to broadly address worsening disparities and poverty. For broader ideas, see Appendix A: Treasury Expenditure Categories for Recovery Fund Reporting and Appendix B: Program and Services Ideas Related to Addressing Equity and Poverty from Treasury.
We are happy to see that the creative ideas presented on engagegreenbelt.org show support for a broad range of recovery funding.