Editor’s Note: Below are voices from the fight going on in cities and states across the country for where the $1.9 trillion Covid Relief funds federal stimulus bill will be spent. These funds are intended to help the country recover from the deep economic pain of the pandemic. Some places, however, are spending these monies where the powerful want them spent. In Alabama, the governor is using those funds to build more prisons. In Chicago the mayor spent $281.5 million on police payroll. Below we focus on Detroit, MI and Oakland, CA where grassroots people and groups are demanding the people have a say over how “their” money it is spent.
Photo / Louis Aguillar, BridgeDetroit
DETROIT, MI
These excerpts are from an article by Louis Aguilar published in BridgeDetroit.
“It’s been nearly four months since the City approved its plan to spend $826 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, a historic amount of federal support that many hope will tackle some of Detroit’s toughest problems. …
“Since that time, $53.6 million in contracts have been approved and a program to fix 1,000 roofs has been launched, but a pattern has emerged that the top priorities named by residents in a citywide survey are not the programs getting the most funding. . .
“The debate over funding . . . is far from settled. . . about 90 people briefly shut down Woodward Avenue at Grand Circus Park to protest the way the money is being spent. Many want more money to go toward home repair, as well as find a way to compensate the tens of thousands of homeowners who overpaid in property tax for years.
“The mayor still wants to help his downtown friends first before he gives money to the neighborhoods,” said Daisy Jackson, a member of the Charlevoix Village Association on the east side. She held a sign that described the home repair issue as a crisis. Detroit mayoral candidate Anthony Adams and at-large City Council candidate Nicole Small joined the protesters.
“The protest shows how the ARPA funding is becoming another battle line in the downtown-versus-neighborhoods fight. Many longtime residents contend too many tax breaks and other policies favor new, more affluent residents and big businesses, while neighborhoods deal with things such as lack of affordable housing, high taxes and public safety.
Each entity has wide latitude on how to spend the funding. The City of Detroit government is getting $826 million directly from the feds. Only four cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia — received larger direct amounts.
Click here for the complete story: https://www.bridgedetroit.com/how-detroit-has-spent-american-rescue-plan-act-funding-so-far/
OAKLAND, CA
These excerpts below are from a talk made at the Laney College Poor People’s Teach-in in Oakland, CA by school board member Mike Hutchinson about the fight for Covid Relief dollars to provide for Oakland’s public schools.
“I am a proud graduate of Oakland public schools. I worked in our schools for a long time until Maxwell Park and Santa Fe Elementary were closed in 2012. . . I ‘m really thankful that I got elected, but more than that, that I was able to get elected on this platform [ending school closures, ending the financial mismanagement in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and including the community as partners and decision-makers] . . .
“So already in the last school board meeting two weeks ago, school closure was ended.… So this was a huge victory. . . . Now the next thing on my list is the financial mismanagement within the OUSD. . . money is the big issue. . .
“We actually do not have a financial crisis. Our fund balance, the amount of money we have in our account, has been growing every year. . . And now because of the pandemic the OUSD is receiving almost $300 million in COVID relief donors. These are extra dollars on top of our budget. . . there’s been this issue in the district for a long time where everything the community has been asked for, we get told we can’t afford it, or we don’t have funding for it. That is not true. And it’s even less true now that we have these COVID relief dollars. And this is the big issue now going on in OUSD, especially over the next month . . .
“So now, we’re about to go in some real deep conversation about how to use our COVID relief dollars . . . but this is going to be hard, and we don’t have a good history in Oakland of community controlling the decisions over how our resources are used. . . I’m working on making sure we have real community decision-making over. . . how we want to use these dollars . . .
“. . . . We have a unique opportunity right now. . . we have the ability to make kind of a fresh start moving forward because things have been so decimated during the pandemic. And on top of that, we have new leadership in place with some new ideas. And on top of that, we have extra funding specifically for these changes. . .
“I believe we need to use these COVID relief dollars to bring about transformational change. If we put $30 million a year into our school sites . . . we could use $10 million to raise per people spending across the district. Then we could have $20 million a year, our 40 schools that need the most help give them each an extra half, a million dollars a year and let the community at those school sites decide how to use those resources. For $30 million a year we could really jumpstart transformational change.
“…We have been told forever that ‘we can’t, we can’t, we can’t, our schools can’t do it. We don’t have funding, we don’t deserve it.’ All of those messages are false. And now, as we are slowly taking back control of our public institutions, now is our time to step in and insist that the decisions are made to actually serve our communities. I really encourage everyone to get involved. . . . so we, as a community are really working in coalition around all of our public education institutions. Black and brown folks across the country are asking how do we find out how much COVID relief dollars our institutions are receiving? And then how do we ensure those dollars actually coming to the communities and serving the needs that they were intended for? This is what we’re all talking about. My official school board email is mikeHutchinson@ousd.org.”
