January 26, 2023
Leaders in Land Banking: A Conversation with Adam Zaranko at the Albany County Land Bank
Leaders in Land Banking: A Conversation with Adam Zaranko at the Albany County Land Bank
November 16, 2021
States, Tribes, counties, and municipalities around the country have been hard at work determining how to use their allocations from the American Rescue Plan Act’s $350 billion State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund – which we often clumsily abbreviate as the ARPA SLFRF.
Every unit of government should have already received at least the first half of its ARPA SLFRF allocation, and the ways in which communities are determining how to program their potentially transformative federal relief payments are diverse and span the broad flexible uses authorized in Treasury’s Interim Final Rule.
The Interim Final Rule issued by the Department of the Treasury outlines broad categories of eligible uses governed by several guiding principles – that the funds should be used to:
Center for Community Progress submitted a public comment letter to Treasury in July, as did many of our stakeholders, expressing our appreciation for Treasury’s flexible interpretation of the ARPA statute, and encouraging Treasury to go even further in subsequent guidance to explicitly name additional uses relevant to stabilizing neighborhoods.
To respond to the ARPA SLFRF question we hear most often these days, we do not know when – or if – Treasury will be releasing additional guidance beyond what was contained in its Interim Final Rule. In the federal rulemaking process, an agency will typically alter an interim final rule if the public comments received warrant changes. However, Treasury is continuing to release updated guidance on its ARPA SLFRF landing page, most recently having uploaded revised reporting guidance on November 5, 2021. Community Progress will continue to monitor Treasury’s announcements for major updates, but we encourage ARPA watchers to get in the habit of refreshing Treasury’s SLFRF pages frequently.
In the meantime, the Center for Community Progress has created new quick reference documents outlining how ARPA funding may connect to key vacant property systems in communities. Local leaders can use these reference pieces to learn more about the systems that can help address vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties and how ARPA may provide an opportunity to improve those systems.
From our review of ARPA plans from around the country, we are encouraged to see that, resoundingly, communities have called out deteriorating and vacant properties as a key issue that must be addressed to strengthen their neighborhoods. Below are just a handful of examples of how communities across the US are using ARPA funds to improve critical systems that address VAD properties.
Let us know how your community is using ARPA funding to address property vacancy and deterioration! Email us at info@communityprogress.org
To learn more about the American Rescue Plan Act, visit communityprogress.org/resources/arpa/
Blog authored by Danielle Lewinski and Rob Finn
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