Through the American Rescue Plan Act, Pittsfield, Massachusetts is preparing to spend $32 million in federal relief aid. The city has received half of the funding already, with the second portion expected to arrive next spring. As Pittsfield continues to recover from the economic recession that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Linda Tyer has turned to the community to determine how to best spend the fortune. In addition to a series of forums focused on issues like housing, tourism, and public health, Pittsfield has a survey on spending the money on its website that’s open until Wednesday evening. WAMC spoke to Tyer about what she’s hearing from city residents.
TYER: One of the common themes that I've heard during the community forums is a real interest in investing in people and investing in ways that will support their success in the future.
WAMC: And when you say invest in people, you mean through social programming or nonprofits- What avenue would achieve that?
Yeah, I think there is a combination of things that rose to the surface during all four forums. For example, housing came up in every one of the four forums, even though each forum focused on a different topic. Also mental health and responding to how COVID-19 has impacted the mental health of people in our city. That rose to the surface in each one of the forums. So there seems to be some common themes that are that that are being presented to us by the participants.
Now, internally, have you developed any more plans from inside city hall about ways to spend the money?
We haven't. What we plan to do next is to take everything that we learned from the community forums and the information that's being collected through the community surveys, and have a conversation about, what did we learn? What did we hear? What are the common themes? And continue to narrow the focus.
Now, the city is also taking a survey approach to answering some questions about the ARPA funding. How's that process going?
Well, we've been pretty pleased. The last that I checked late last week, we had over 900 responses to the survey, which is remarkable. We really did everything we could to promote the survey amongst all of our partners in the community. And we are getting a good response, and I'm looking forward to seeing the final results. The survey closes at five o'clock on September 1st.
Now, beyond the survey, what are other ways Pittsfielders can still have their voices heard in this process? Is that basically the last avenue before you start going into deeper considerations?
No, I think there- We’re going to, as I've said at all the forums, we've view this community conversation as being something that we'll have to undertake as we continue to roll out projects for the ARPA funding. In the meantime, though, as I mentioned, it's not too late to do the community survey. We have an ARPA email address. So if anyone wants to send us information about their views and their perspective, they can do that at ARPA@cityofpittsfield.org. And today, I believe we have put up on the city's website the four presentations that were made at the community forums along with the interactive results from those forums. So people, if they're interested, can go to the city's website, take a look at where we are today, just in terms of gathering information and the feedback that we've received from the community.
