Urban areas are being shortchanged on federal stimulus funds, according to a study by the New York Times. Cities and their surrounding areas are home to two-thirds of the country’s population, three-quarters of the nation’s economic activity and the worst traffic congestion, but they are receiving much less than two-thirds of the transportation funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
The New York Times analyzed 5,274 transportation projects approved so far and concluded that the stimulus money was being spent disproportionately on rural areas, in keeping with a historical tendency of state lawmakers, who decide how to spend most of the federal money.
“If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,” Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, which advocates more targeted spending, told the Times. “But states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.”
Missouri, for example, has allocated nearly half of its stimulus money to 89 small counties that combined have only a quarter of the state’s population.
“We have a long history of shortchanging cities and metropolitan areas and allocating transportation money to places where few people live,” said Owen D. Gutfreund, an assistant professor of urban planning at the City University of New York.
Mayors lobbied Congress to send the stimulus money directly to cities, the Times reported, but Congress decided to send 70% of the money to the states to distribute and 30% to metropolitan planning organizations.
Officials in the Obama administration are carefully watching how states are spending the economic stimulus funding. How the money is distributed will influence how the administration sets future transportation policy, including whether they advocate establishing a national infrastructure bank, which would rank projects and offer assistance in getting them financed.
