(gentle music) - Bring us up to date.

What is this money?

Where did it come from?

Let's just start.

- Really, the ARPA funds, the American Rescue Plan Act, is dedicated for pandemic relief.

So, Detroit got $827 million from the federal government to address COVID impacts.

Pretty much everything that this funding is going to has to have some kind of tie to the pandemic.

Cities have been pretty, they've been pretty creative with how they've been able to spend the money.

Detroit has to spend all of its ARPA funding by the end of 2026.

Otherwise anything that's left over could be taken back by the feds.

So that puts us on kind of a tighter timeline to spend this money.

You know, much of 2022 was spent planning, trying to find out what the community's priorities were, what the Mayor administration's priorities were for spending this money.

There were different.

Now we've started to see in 2023 a more rapid ramp up of that spending.

A lot of the money that's been spent so far has gone toward demolitions, blight removal.

A lot of the funding has gone toward different police initiatives and kind of public safety programs.

There's been money put toward housing repairs and different programs to stabilize neighborhoods.

What's interesting is in this last month we learned that Detroit plans to spend all of its funding by summer 2025, which is ahead of that 2026 deadline.

The Detroit is saying that it's gonna spend its money faster than required.

- Where's this money gonna go?

- Yeah, so the city spent 95 million out of 827 million.

So that's about 12% of the money that's been spent so far.

Another 42% of the spending has been obligated in specific contracts that haven't yet been approved.

So that money has been essentially set aside.

So you put that together, that's about half of the funding has already been kind of dedicated for something specific and that leaves a little under half of the funding still available for the next two years.

But that doesn't mean that the city doesn't have a plan for how to spend that.

There's actually, you know, the vast majority of the funds have been dedicated for specific policies and programs.

Anybody can go on the city's website.

There's actually a breakdown of this online.

The different kind of spending categories between neighborhood improvements, safety, intergenerational poverty, these kinds of programs.

I think what we're gonna see before the end of the year, they're looking to spend about 97 more million dollars.

So basically like everything that we spent so far, they plan to match that spending before the summer recess which begins at the end of July.

- Oh wow.

- So that's, you know, just in a month basically.

And then another 148 million in contracts are expected to get approved by the winter recess in November.

The goal is by the end of this year to have 75% of the ARPA funding obligated, leaving only about a quarter of it to be approved in 2024.

And then that money would get spent through 2025.

And some of the programs that you can expect this to go toward, sidewalk repairs are a major one that's moving forward right now.

There are more police programs that are moving forward.

ShotStoppers was this new initiative that was announced.

Six different local community organizations are getting $10 million in funding between them to work on gun violence initiatives.

So that's a major source of funding.

A lot of this is going toward demolitions, eliminating the commercial blight that we've seen as well as now, the mayor's office is going after private property owners as well.

So, we're gonna continue to kind of see that.

- How's that going to hit the average Detroiter?

- So, you know, there's an ARPA program that's planting trees in neighborhoods, right?

So that's something that you could see a direct impact of.

There's an ARPA program that is doing alleyway cleanup.

There's an ARPA program for turning parks into art spaces, right?

So these are kind of like some basic quality of life improvements that you could see out of the funding.

You know, there's funding that's going toward major job training programs that are helping connect out of work Detroiters to the workforce for the first time as well as getting people, allowing people to transition into different careers, right?

So that's an impact.

- Is there anything in particular that you are going to be keeping your eye on as all of this unfolds as these projects start, as these programs get started?

What are you going to stay focused on?

- The community violence intervention programs that the city has funded.

Really the first time Detroit has invested like this in community based solutions to gun violence.

This isn't like a police program.

This is a program run by nonprofits throughout the city.

And there's gonna be a lot of study on how successful that's been and if it can be replicated.

I think another one is the parks improvements.

I didn't mention the Joe Louis Greenway which is another major source of funding through these ARPA dollars.

And that's supposed to create all kinds of side effects along the line.

It's supposed to better connect neighborhoods as well as like spur development along the route.

I think the workforce training programs are another big one.

I think it's $100 million is being put toward Detroit at Work and these adult literacy programs and these things that are supposed to improve the workforce.

Those are the major ones that I'm kind of paying attention to.