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Fifty million dollars.
That is roughly how much combined funding the City of Bangor and Penobscot County received from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed in 2021. It is time for that money to be put to the rescue in a more significant way — particularly in helping to address homelessness in the region.
The city and county each rightly undertook a process of listening to the community to hear what priorities people have for how to spend this vast amount of federal money. People in the region have repeatedly emphasized areas such as housing, recovery and mental health services as priorities for this funding.
In August, Penobscot County officials awarded approximately $200,000 in a first round of grants to local organizations that do work related to mental health and substance use. That is a good start. But county and city officials must do more, and quickly, to connect this available funding with existing needs.
“We’ve never had this much money, and we’ve never had problems to this extent,” Doug Dunbar, leader of the advocacy coalition Penobscot County Cares, said in a recent Bangor Daily News story.
There may be different perspectives on how to spend the money, but can anyone really disagree with this statement? It is a painfully obvious assessment that demands action. Now.
The county received around $30 million in ARPA funds, and the city roughly $20 million. The final rules for spending it were issued in January. Counties, cities and towns have until 2026 to spend this money (some of which has already been spent), but clearly there are plenty of problems that require attention and action right now.
With the level of ARPA funds still unspent, and the mounting and interconnected challenges heading into another Maine winter, the conclusion should frankly be clear for local officials: Failing to more speedily use these available resources to help address immediate needs cannot be an option.
We’re all for deliberation, but that must be followed by decision-making.
It’s not really a question of funding. It’s not even a question of creativity. Other cities have already proven that there are productive paths to take with ARPA funds. The City of Portland has already chosen to use some of its federal American Rescue Plan funds to install five new metal restroom structures, a small step to help its population of unhoused people. Burlington, Vermont, decided in February to use some of these federal COVID relief funds on “shelter pods.”
Maine may be in the early stages of implementing Built for Zero, a national program aiming to end homelessness. But other places working with the Built for Zero model, like Burlington, have already made these small shelter communities part of their approach.
Cleaning up encampments now and again isn’t solving the underlying problems, even with efforts to connect people to services. Neither would a potential city policy to link the allowance of encampments with the availability of shelter space. The city has made some progress in terms of moving forward with new housing developments and enacting a zoning change to allow boarding homes on some streets, but these won’t yield results right away.
As a community, we cannot continue to fail to address problems and then turn around and blame the people most impacted by them. We cannot decry conditions downtown and then turn around and oppose housing developments elsewhere in the city that would help bolster overall housing availability. We cannot fail to take care of the people already here out of fear of attracting more unhoused people to the area.
All of that would be a recipe for continuing on the same path we’re on now, and for not improving anything. If local leaders agree that housing is a priority, and that we need to do something about homelessness in the region, then it is time to put these unprecedented resources toward fixing what are ultimately solvable problems. That must include building more housing, both in the short and long term.
These are complicated issues, no doubt, and it’s much easier for us to opine about them than to do the actual work. We won’t pretend otherwise. But with the millions of dollars in ARPA funds available in the region, no one should pretend that there aren’t resources or ideas to help address these challenges. It is time to turn those ideas into action.
