Public Finance Training and Analysis
Civilytics conducts community-initiated audits of capital and operating budgets at the city, county, and state level. We train grassroots organizations to analyze and communicate about their local budgets and we build tools to make this work less time-consuming and more easily comparative over time and across places.
How 5 Words Shifted $5 Billion Dollars (ARPA Aid to Small Towns Part II)
Update (6/29/2021): We've published our full methodology in part 3 including how you can recreate this analysis using official data sources and why it took so long to figure out. In Part I we showed that the decision to allocate non-entitlement unit (NEU) funding based on the non-metro population rather than the NEU population led...
ARPA Aid to Small Towns
Treasury divided this $19.53B evenly among states based on their non-metropolitan population, as directed by the legislation. But the aid only goes to "non-entitlement units." In many states, a substantial share of the population lives in unincorporated areas so "non-metro population" ≠ "non-entitlement population" in many states. The seemingly small decision about how to count...
State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds
What are the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds? Established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Program (SLFRP) provides $350 billion in emergency fiscal recovery funding (FRF) for eligible state, local, territorial, and Tribal governments. All state and local governments are eligible for some...
Local Government Aid Estimates for the American Rescue Plan
The American Rescue Plan allocates $350 billion in aid for state and local governments. Look up how much your city or county is estimated to receive (it's generally a lot!) and learn more about how and when the funds can be used.
How the American Rescue Plan Affects Your Community
In this edition of the Civic Pulse, you’ll find: estimates for how much $ local governments will receive through the American Rescue Plan, an intro to Tableau's new Racial Equity Data Hub, an intro to Civilytics' first hire, and more.
5 Impactful Ways Cities Could Spend Their ARPA Aid
The American Rescue Plan provides large direct payments to local governments to address the fallout from the COVID-19 global pandemic and its economic ramifications. Here are five ideas for impactful ways cities could spend this aid.
Related Projects
Pricing Policing in Your City
New tool to explore city's spending in an apples-to-apples way across time and across cities. Fiscally standardized historical spending data from 150 large U.S. cities allows users to explore per capita spending trends for policing, education, health, and other public services.