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Smaller, poorer cities like Flint, Michigan, often get left behind for federal investments, which can lead to disaster.
This article appears in the October 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The bipartisan infrastructure law gives a unique opportunity to communities across the country. For the first time, federal dollars are widely available to take on major infrastructure projects, invest in public transportation, increase access to high-speed internet, and shore up resilience against climate change. The historic funding has the potential to revitalize infrastructure for decades, but communities need to survive competitive and inequitable bidding processes to receive and utilize the investment.
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The Biden administration has attempted to address these inequities by mandating resources for marginalized communities. The Justice40 Initiative requires that 40 percent of the federal funding of certain investments flow to disadvantaged communities. In the past, funding has indiscriminately flowed to larger and more privileged communities, leading to widespread disparities seen across America.
However, even with Justice40 goals, the administration can only offer money to communities that ask for it—and the ability to ask is often limited by strained capacity. By addressing this and other issues, a new federal program aims to ensure disadvantaged and smaller communities get a fair piece of the pie.
In April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced over $170 million in funding for the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers. These 17 TCTACs (pronounced “tic-tacs”) are intended to aid communities and remove barriers to access to funding from the infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and other federal grant opportunities.
“The generations of disinvestment and marginalization of communities of color and low-income communities and indigenous communities across the United States means that tens of thousands of communities across the country are lacking the basic capacity to even get in the game to get [and use] government resources,” Matthew Tejada, the deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice at the EPA, told the Prospect.
Gaining access to federal funding requires detailed proposals, goal-setting, and a detailed understanding of a community’s needs. Larger and more prosperous cities have the workforce and expertise to perform those tasks, simply by having a bigger population and more stakeholders. Smaller communities and municipalities, as well as habitually poor cities, have many of the same needs for better infrastructure and protections against climate change (if not more), but few have sophisticated teams of grant-writers and support staff. The TCTACs are an attempt to address these disparities.
“This is part of the administration’s effort to really disrupt the dynamic where paperwork favors the powerful,” Bonnie Keeler, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and co-lead of the university’s newly designated TCTAC program, told the Prospect.
AS GRIST NOTES, “RURAL COMMUNITIES ARE on the front line of climate change.” Midsized cities and municipalities often also find themselves overburdened by climate change and infrastructure needs. Add in the systemic racism that has forced people of color into certain communities and then subsequently stripped those communities of resources, and there are hundreds of places across the country that are living in the shadow of bigger and wealthier places. Sometimes, this can lead to disaster—take the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, for example.
“Systems established by federal and local governments often suffer from inequities that were designed to focus resources in more affluent areas while excluding minoritized populations from the benefits and power provided by funding,” Janelle Armstrong-Brown, senior manager for the Center for Equity and Social Justice Research at Research Triangle Institute, another TCTAC awardee, told the Prospect over email. “The work of the TCTACs is designed to support rural, remote, and underresourced communities in achieving their environmental justice goals so that they can improve their quality of life and provide them a voice in the environmental decisions that will impact them in the long term.”
The need for expertise is great because there’s so much money on the table: hundreds of billions of dollars in the bipartisan infrastructure law and IRA, which can go toward everything from electric-vehicle charging stations to replacing lead water pipes to reconnecting communities severed by large freeways. “Even if a community is pulling itself together to want to apply to a grant, which one do they go to? There’s thousands of them across the federal government, and the government places the burden on communities to figure out which one is the right one for them. So the TCTACs are really going to help solve that problem for them,” Tejada told the Prospect.
“This is part of the administration’s effort to really disrupt the dynamic where paperwork favors the powerful.”
Each of the technical assistance centers will receive at least $10 million to provide technical assistance to local and disadvantaged communities. The awardees range from Blacks in Green, a nonprofit focused on “Black community economic development,” to the University of Minnesota. The centers are then partnered with colleges, universities, nonprofits, and local governments. There are also awardees designated to aid tribal communities, such as the National Indian Health Board. Some of the centers are partnered specifically with minority-serving institutions to reach further into “underserved and overburdened communities.”
Communities may need support when applying for funding, identifying available resources, goal-setting, or budgeting. The wide breadth of expertise within the technical assistance centers allows more communities to identify their needs and advocate for themselves within intensely competitive funding cycles.
Assistance may be as simple as a fact sheet, or more intensive, with in-person training, networking, webinars, and more, RTI’s Armstrong-Brown told the Prospect. The technical assistance will “not only help [communities] in the short term to receive funding from the federal government, but will also provide them with a knowledge and skills base that they can spread within their organizations and across organizations to develop the next generation of environmental justice leaders [and] sustain those gains in the long term,” Armstrong-Brown said.
The TCTACs are in the startup phase. RTI, for example, has not received any federal funding as of yet, though the organization is working to secure its first year of funding. In the meantime, the centers are working to build capacity and set up internal processing systems for requests.
Having 17 different TCTACs gives communities a broad range of expertise to draw from. “What we’re hoping to do is build really strong collaborative networks across different technical assistance providers at [all] levels so that we can build a net that’s broader than just the capacity of any one technical assistance provider,” Keeler said. This can help to avoid “bouncing” communities around or seeing anyone go unserviced.
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Research Triangle Institute is one of 17 TCTACs assisting disadvantaged communities across the country.
Schools in the backyards of disadvantaged communities have access to legal advice, academic resources, and physical infrastructure that communities can harness. Keeler notes that there will need to be a period of trust-building between the community and the educational institution.
Capacity is also an issue because the scale of projects can vary between communities. Program partners are focused on the needs of the community that they articulate for themselves. A program that provides limited resources and does not meet communities where they are will not go very far.
WHILE THE TCTACS ARE IN THE STARTUP PHASE, they are building on other technical assistance programs that have been active for years. Two years ago, the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network launched a pro bono technical assistance program that focused on capacity-building. The program is intended to assist organizations and communities to “more effectively and meaningfully participate in government decision-making by helping them navigate EPA, potential grants, regulatory processes, federal policies, and publicly available data to support their work,” the website reads. EPN has provided assistance on over 400 requests, and helped communities access millions of dollars in federal funding.
EPN says it has partnered with ten of the awardees, and told the Prospect that it hopes to add all of them. “We currently assist with community-identified issues including climate resilience, air quality, drinking water, hazardous waste, toxic chemicals, and more,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of EPN.
A step-by-step guide for the EPA’s Solar for All competition that EPN shared with the Prospect includes formatting guidelines, goal-setting examples, and other tools that stakeholders can use to become familiar with requirements and save time when applying. The $7 billion EPA program will award up to 60 grants “to expand the number of low-income and disadvantaged communities primed for residential solar investment.”
Further, the EPA’s Technical Assistance to Brownfields (TAB) Communities Program has provided support for communities affected by brownfields, which are potentially contaminated swaths of land, since 2018. The TAB program provides knowledge on how to clean up brownfield properties, comply with requirements, and more. In May, the EPA announced an additional $53 million for the TAB program, as part of a $315 million package through President Biden’s “Investing in America” agenda to “expedite the assessment and cleanup of brownfield sites across the country while advancing environmental justice.”
Groundwork USA, a network of local organizations that also provides expertise to municipalities, was particularly instrumental in the community of Paris, Kentucky, and the revitalization of the city’s Westside. Anna Allen-Edwards, a former city commissioner, formed the Paris Westside Neighborhood Association. She was concerned with a transfer station, or city dump, located within a predominantly Black neighborhood. “We decided that was something that needed to go,” Allen-Edwards told the Prospect. “We didn’t know how to do that.”
In searching for support, the association came across Groundwork and the technical assistance work the organization does with brownfields. Groundwork helped the team form community engagement strategies and locate grants. The effort is now in the final stages of seeing the transfer station moved.
“Groundwork has been helping us navigate the bureaucracy and the different opportunities that are out there,” Allen-Edwards said. “And they have been very conscious of helping us understand social environmental injustice.”
“We really kind of operate from the perspective of equity and environmental justice,” John Valinch, senior manager of climate resilience and land use at Groundwork, said. Whether a community has just begun the cleanup process or they are about to finalize the project, Groundwork can provide in-house geographic information system (GIS) tools, help craft community revitalization or engagement plans, and connect with stakeholders.
“There are so many people in this field and we couldn’t do it without each other,” Valinch said. “Taken together, when you look at the TABs, when you look at the TCTACs, and what Groundwork USA is providing, we really approach this from [an] integrated perspective.”
With so much funding available, and climate change accelerating every day, the moment could not be more critical for communities across the country. Stories like that from Paris, Kentucky, demonstrate how instrumental technical assistance can be to seeing a project through. These efforts will make or break environmental justice for years to come. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment to see that this funding benefits the communities who need it the most,” Roos said.
The Prospect’s reporting on the implementation of the Biden administration’s industrial policy is supported through funding from Omidyar Network.
