Houston and the American Rescue Plan

The $615 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds Houston will receive has the potential to be transformational for Houstonians.

This round of federal COVID-related aid is more generous than last year’s. It allows cities and counties to plug holes in city budgets due to pandemic related drops in city revenues, not just new COVID-19-related expenses, and may be used on a wide variety of expenditures to help communities recover from and continue fighting the coronavirus.

These funds should be spent not just to restore, but to build back better than we were before the pandemic. They should be spent in a way that takes into account the many historic and ongoing inequities that have prevented far too many residents of our city from accessing opportunity and realizing the promise of good jobs, healthy lives, and stable communities.

To achieve those goals it is vital that Houston City Council engage a wide variety of stakeholders in a process to provide input on how this money should be spent to ensure it has the maximum transformational impact it could have. This process should:

• Include a diverse and representative group of community members
• Be founded on an equitable framework developed through collaboration and oversight of communities in need
• Prioritize projects that will have long term, transformative impacts far beyond 2024
• Be accountable to the community and our elected representatives on the city council
• Incorporate benchmarks for success to help determine the effectiveness of projects

Harris County has committed to undertaking such a process, but the City of Houston has not taken similar steps yet.

We urge City Council to begin a process to gather input from key stakeholders to ensure the spending will have maximum impact on creating a fairer and more equitable Houston.

Sincerely,

Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO

Texas Organizing Project

Workers Defense Action Fund

HOME Coalition

If you agree, call your council member TODAY and tell them we need a transparent, equitable process to determine how these funds are spent.