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Have an idea about how to spend $40 million? Pittsfield wants to hear it

A stone building with a colonnade sits below a grey sky amid snowdrifts.
Josh Landes
/
WAMC

Pittsfield, Massachusetts is seeking proposals on how to spend the $40 million the city is receiving from the American Rescue Plan Act.

At Monday’s announcement, Mayor Linda Tyer stressed that months of study and community engagement had determined how Pittsfield will allocate the federal pandemic relief funding.

“The American Rescue Plan provides a once in a lifetime infusion of funds that can transform Pittsfield into a city of social and economic resiliency for everyone, especially for people who have been historically underserved, marginalized or adversely affected by racial inequity, and generational poverty,” she said.

Six tenets will guide the city’s process.

“First, we will strive toward ensuring that city residents have a comfortable, safe and dignified place to call home," said the mayor. "We create safe and healthy neighborhoods supported by quality infrastructure, access to affordable child care, and opportunities for job training and financial security. We want to enhance community access to public health, mental and behavioral health and youth services. We want to strengthen and engage with community partners to create access to services, housing and economic opportunities. We support creativity, the expression of culture and artistic excellence, so that everyone has access to the arts, and an opportunity for self-expression. And finally, we want to build the power and voice of lower income people and people of color, so that all residents share in the future of our community.”

Pittsfield’s $40 million is coming in halves, the first of which has already hit its coffers.

“This is still part of that first $20 million allocation, right?" explained Tyer. "So, we still have another $20 million that will come to the city probably in May of 2022. So this is still within that round, that first $20 million round. And we really have sort of put the funds, this first $20 million, into sort of two buckets, right? So community initiatives and programs, and then city-led initiatives, like the infrastructure work we're doing at the Ashley Reservoir and the improvements that we want to make at our fire stations so that they're healthier buildings where our firefighters live and sleep and eat and work. So it’s really started to, really sort of create these sort of, you know, organically, have created these two buckets of focus.”

The city prepared two applications for potential municipal projects: an official application and a concept one.

“What we heard, both from the community and from the advisory council, is that there could be emerging leaders right here in our community who have an idea that could be transformative, that could be meaningful and powerful," said Tyer. "But they aren't yet quite ready to meet all the criteria and requirements contained in the American Rescue Plan. And we didn't want to discourage people from applying. So the concept application is really, I have an idea, do you think that this is viable? And our goal is to find ways to make connections, build that network, help that person maybe collaborate with a nonprofit organization to help really accelerate the concept.”

Pittsfield starts accepting applications on February 28th, with a projected turnaround time of 30 to 45 days. The city must decide how it will spend the $40 million by the end of 2024.

“We still have some city-led priorities that we want to make investments in," said the mayor. "And so we view the remainder of this $20 million as really giving us opportunities to invest in that work. And then as we see how this plays out with our community partners, we’ll make decisions for the second round. But, you know, we've identified that a significant component of the city led investments will be in housing, right? And we know that we are going to need community partners to accomplish some of our housing goals. And so we want to reserve enough funds to meet those goals, those housing goals.”

Tyer says around $6 million has been set aside specifically for the first round of community applications.

Pittsfielders interested in submitting proposals for ARPA spending can find out more here.

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Josh Landes has been WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief since February 2018, following stints at WBGO Newark and WFMU East Orange. A passionate advocate for Western Massachusetts, Landes was raised in Pittsfield and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, receiving his bachelor's in Ethnomusicology and Radio Production. His free time is spent with his cat Harry, experimental electronic music, and exploring the woods.
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