February 16, 2022

Dear Mayor and City Council,

We the undersigned residents of Takoma Park urge you to focus American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding on assisting our most vulnerable fellow residents and businesses, addressing pandemic-related hardship, and advancing equity.  To this end, we urge you to take the following steps.

• Increase funding for direct cash assistance to at least $2.35 million (the cost originally estimated by your staff) to help all low-income residents (i.e., those in below market rate, subsidized rental units and those receiving needs-based assistance) with rent, utilities, childcare, health care, and food.
• Include at least $700,000 for neighborhood navigators and social service partnerships with community-based organizations, with a special emphasis on food security.
• Restore funding for rental housing rehab and energy efficiency improvements to the levels originally proposed by your staff, prior to last week’s proposed cuts.
• Retain at least $1.7 million from your preliminary decisions as follows: $500,000 to prevent housing eviction, $300,000 for small business emergency grants, $300,000 for recreation program scholarships and tutoring assistance, $14,000 for laptop and wifi hotspot lending, and $600,000 for mental health workers.
• Require that ARPA-funded mental health services be coordinated with, but not under the auspices, of the police department. This requirement would be consistent with the recommendation of the City’s Re-imagining Public Safety Task Force.
• Confirm that the lower $400,000 amount in the revised staff plan for broadband access for low-income residents will be sufficient before settling on that amount.

As you will recall, we previously urged you to spend more of your ARPA funds on urgent human needs, and we now beseech you not to go below the levels specified above. The cost of these programs would be less than half the total ARPA funding, leaving over half the funds for many other projects. We are the type of community ARPA was designed to serve, by compensating for the stark economic disparities that have made the pandemic so hard for some families. As just one example, a third of the children in our elementary schools receive free or reduced-price meals and nearly a fifth do not have English as a first language. In Takoma Park and across the country, the pandemic has further exacerbated such inequalities.

We recognize that at this point in your deliberations you have hard choices before you. The above-listed programs cannot be fully funded alongside all the other worthy programs proposed by the staff. We therefore urge you to prioritize these urgently needed programs. If you cut these fundamental programs back to accommodate all the other expenditures, we fear they will not have the effectiveness we all seek.  

Thank you for the work you have done so far in attempting to meet ARPA’s goals of responding to urgent pandemic-related economic needs and addressing racial inequity. As you begin to make final decisions, we urge your support for the basic package outlined in this letter.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
 

Names