Empire State organizations such as the New York State Association of Towns (NYTOWNS), New York State Association of Counties (NYSAC) and the New York State Conference of Mayors and Municipal Officials (NYCOM) which represent the many levels of local governments across the state are also busy tracking funding allocations and keeping their own scorecards.  For example there is NYCOM’s Municipal ARPA Plans and Programs inventory, NYTOWNS procurement guide, and NYSAC’s county-level breakdown of funding   And there’s more.  The U.S Treasury Department’s Allocation for Metropolitan Cities  or the Brookings Local Government ARPA Investment Tracker.  Your county or municipality may have yet to make the connection to these geospatial opportunities.  

The Brookings ARPA Investment Tracker is one of several sites monitoring the use of grant funds. Erie County’s use of the funding is highlighted here with 92% of the funding being used for infrastructure purposes. Other New York State government interim reports can be found here.

But even with all of this publicly available information, and aggressive marketing by the vendor community, there seems to be a limited amount discussion about how these major federal grant funding programs can be woven into local geospatial initiatives.  And this is unfortunate because its very clear there ARE local activities which are “ARPA eligible” in the areas such infrastructure management, economic development, health and human services delivery, housing, transportation and community revitalization to name only a few.  So who is leading the statewide local government ARPA geospatial discussion?

Diving a little deeper, I took out attempting to survey the statewide local government geospatial community on the ARPA and IIJA programs by issuing a simple survey via the NYS GIS listserv, as well as having a link put on the NYS GIS Assocation’s website (thank you, Association webmasters).  Perhaps I would have gotten a better response to the survey offering links to both of the funding programs, but instead, wanted to capture the respondent’s immediate understanding/awareness of the programs when opening the survey.  Providing links to the programs would have defeated the purpose of the survey.   And I made it clear the survey was only for New York State local government users and/or their contractors.    That takes a lot of potential respondents off the table via the listserv and with local government representation in the Association hovering around less than 25% of the total membership, I wasn’t sure what the response would be.  Though not included in the images below, I emailed a handful of former county colleagues separately ahead of the online survey which resulted in very similar results.

The results can hardly be considered a statistically representative sample of the statewide local government GIS user community.  I received only 20 responses of which 18 provided usable data.   As such, I would submit the following pie charts can be considered illustrative or reflectiveof the current overall awareness, if not understanding, of the current ARPA funding programs.  While only a third of the respondents indicated they were even aware of the ARPA program (first pie chart),  there was barely any understanding of the funding as it relates to geospatial (second pie chart) and only one of the respondents indicated he/she had been involved in any discussions regarding the use of ARPA funding (third pie chart) in their organization.   Though to some degree many GIS practitioners across the state often hold down technical positions in department-line staff positions which are normally far removed from the grant funds discussions being held in much higher administrative offices.

Unfortunately, as historically been the case, the top level NYS government associations noted above have rarely made GIS/geospatial a visible and outward facing part of their agenda.  Even today, Its hard to find anything really meaningful for the local government GIS community when using keyword searchs such as  “GIS, geospatial, or mapping” on any of their websites.  And its highly doubtful there will be, or can be, any real meaningful advocacy through any state program offices as this political or elected official outreach framework doesn’t even exist on behalf of local government GIS programs.    As the next generation of local government GIS/geospatial programs evolve, particularly in the urban environments where the focus will be more on the public infrastructure, utilities, sustainability and climate change impacts, large scale and high resolution mapping and surveying – the collective internet of things (IoT) – discussions and geospatial strategies with most state government offices in this space will  become more distant.    Geospatial programs for different levels of government in New York State evolving in completely different directions.   Albeit for sure New York City is on a different level when is comes to infrastructure and underground mapping, but it’s Underground Infrastructure Project concept does represent an important direction of the next generation of local government GIS programs in urban areas across the state.  It’s just a matter of degree.

The list below, from an ESRI publication and is available on numerous websites, highlights the local government programs in play.  No, not necessarily direct funding to your GIS office, but does serve as a roadmap of who GIS practioners should be talking with at the local level.  EcoDev, public health, infrastructure and public works, and cooperative efforts with utilities.  And then find out who is administering your government’s ARPA funding.    You can be assured someone or some agency has dibs on the funding.  And apparently the GIS programs are only visible in the rearview mirrow. 

The four major ARPA funding program areas include:

1.  Support public health expenditures, by, for example, funding COVID-19 mitigation efforts, medical expenses, behavioral healthcare, and certain public health and safety staff

2.  Address negative economic impacts caused by the public health emergency, including economic harms to workers, households, small businesses, impacted industries, and the public sector

3.  Replace lost public sector revenue, using this funding to provide government services to the extent of the reduction in revenue experienced due to the pandemic

4.  Invest in water, sewer, and broadband infrastructure, making necessary investments to improve access to clean drinking water, support vital wastewater and stormwater infrastructure, and to expand access to broadband internet

Within these overall categories, recipients have broad flexibility to decide how best to use this funding to meet the needs of their communities

While actually securing funding is much easier said than done, often requiring great grant and proposal writing skills as well as involving many individual offices and agendas in the organization.  But the almost complete lack of even a discussion by the statewide local government GIS/geospatial community to date seems amiss.

There are so few funding opportunities such as these 2021 federal grant programs to take advantage of.  These are generational programs.  Right now the onus of finding representation and advocacy for local government GIS funding in the federal grants arena falls squarely on local government GIS leaders and their representatives.  As well as local GIS practitioners.

Right now, though, the silence is deafening.