Could the Recovery Act help reinvent government?

• Author: Peirce, Neal
• Position: Commentary - Column

If you think the Obama administration's $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is just one big government boondoggle, check out some top regional implementation strategies.

Kansas City Missouri, for example. A big infusion of stimulus funds is being focused on a newly dubbed "Green Impact Zone," a 150-block area of the inner city long plagued by poverty, violence, abandonment, and joblessness.

The goal is nothing less than turning around every negative indicator in an area that's long been a glaring exception to the Kansas City region's general prosperity--notwithstanding its proximity to major roads and a large health sciences cluster.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., gets credit for conceiving the Green Impact Zone idea. But the entire metropolitan region stepped in--the Mid-America Regional Council, city departments, neighborhood groups, community development organizations, employment and energy nonprofits, and others.

Their agenda runs from weatherizing every home that needs it to a bus rapid transit system, to community policing, to a home-by-home outreach, including job training and placement.

The Kansas City story is not unique. California's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency invited all 12 regions of the state to propose ways to spend stimulus funds most effectively The star responder was the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, which mapped ways to connect the monies to advance the region's 21st-century goals, ranging from transportation and water security to work-force development.

All of the Bay Area's nine counties and 101 cities came onboard,with mayors, county supervisors, business leaders, and legislative delegations in Sacramento, California, offering input. Proposals include a new stem cell research facility, full conversion to LED streetlights, even ways to integrate electric vehicles with the power grid.

The Kansas City and Bay Area regions aren't alone. The Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program has been able to identify several others--among them Memphis, Tennessee; Chicago, Illinois; even smaller areas such as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Flagstaff, Arizona--where regions have "gotten their act together" to connect dots and make ARRA funds serve cohesive area-wide agendas.

Normally regions wouldn't have the funds for such far-reaching--and, one could argue, historically long-delayed--initiatives. Which is why the Recovery Act offered such a rare opportunity Understandably, people...