With President Joe Biden announcing last week that he would not be running for reelection, it’s worth examining the somewhat understated impact Biden had on Alexandria.
Though most of its discussion was relegated to long City budget meetings, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that Biden helped spearhead had a significant impact on Alexandria’s recovery from Covid.
Alexandria received $59.6 million in ARPA funding in two tranches of $29.8 million in May 2021 and 2022, respectively.
“The City of Alexandria has benefitted directly from the support and leadership of President Biden and is grateful for the resources received during the pandemic through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA),” said City Manager James Parajon. “This aid provided not only immediate relief but will have a lasting impact on our entire community.”
The City of Alexandria has a detailed breakdown of where that ARPA funding went on its website. Beyond the $2 million dedicated to covering COVID expenses and response, ARPA funding also helped Alexandria tackle a variety of longtime infrastructure problems.
According to Parajon:
Recognizing the direct impact the pandemic had on our most vulnerable populations, the City focused resources on strengthening its community through initiatives such as:
- A $5.5 million investment in emergency food security and rent relief, providing access to vital support services. This included direct aid as well as funds to access legal support to prevent evictions.
- A $2.5 million contribution to establish two community food hubs where families select food and household supplies close to their home and according to their schedules and food choices.
- A $3 million investment to join other communities in establishing a guaranteed basic income pilot program, ensuring that individuals and families were able to thrive in the long term.
- A $1 million program to bolster mental health support for court-involved individuals.
Around $5.7 million went to flash flooding spot improvements and addressing repair and resiliency in the city’s stormwater infrastructure. Another $2.8 million went to early childhood workforce stabilization.
Even some of the smaller pieces of ARPA funding helps push forward projects that have made a significant difference in Alexandria. The City’s website said $100,000 went to infrastructure and amenities to make the closure of the 100 block of King Street permanent and facilitated expansion on to other blocks.
Keith Waters, assistant director of the Stephen S. Fuller Institute and Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, outlined the benefits and some of the possible negative impacts on Alexandria from ARPA.
“My broadest takeaway is that it was really a pretty diverse set of programs that Alexandria spent money on,” said Keith Waters. “It was 60 billion carte blanche to spend on your priorities, and to an extent it does reveal the priorities.”
Waters said that ARPA funding “touched every aspect of civic and personal life” in Alexandria. Waters said it’s possible many of these programs never would have gotten off the ground without support from ARPA.
“My sense of just looking at the types of programs that were funded, it’s a substantial portion of these would have never been funded without ARPA,” Waters said. “It’s difficult to look at these programs that were funded and imagine the city, in Covid days when they’re nervous about their finances, approving a lot of this stuff. It feels like the type of stuff that would have typically gotten the axe.”
Beyond just direct ARPA support, Waters said the city benefitted from the roughly $1 billion that WMATA received.
“The direct impacts alone touched effectively every aspect of life for Alexandrians, likely in a positive way,” Waters said. “My suspicion though is there were some indirect impacts.”
Waters said, however, that additional unemployment benefits included in ARPA may have artificially kept unemployment high longer than it needed to be.
“The one indirect fact I truly believe, just by looking at the graph, at least for 2021 it kept unemployment rates artificially high,” Waters said. “Part of the ARPA provision was that $300 billion for unemployment benefits, which extended them to fall of 2021.”
Waters said unemployment in Alexandria, which had hovered around 1.8% before the pandemic, shot up to 10.1% in April 2020.
However, that rate started to decline over time, and by January 2021 it was down to 4.8%. Waters said that once ARPA was signed in early 2021, though, the number stopped declining and plateaued through the end of August.
“The unemployment benefit went away on Sept. 6,” Waters said. “By November 2021, the unemployment rate fell to 1.9%. Over two months, that unemployment rate dropped 2.6%. This is not going to hold up in any journal of statistics, but it’s effectively a time series analysis, and the only real conclusion can be ARPA.”
Waters said ARPA possibly keeping unemployment rates higher may have made it difficult for some businesses to hire the staff they needed.
“Keeping unemployment high is not great for our region,” Waters said. “It kept people out of the workforce and made it difficult [for businesses] to hire the people they needed.”
Waters also said Alexandria, like every other part of the country, was also affected by inflation that ARPA made worse.
Still, Waters and Parajon both said the impact on the City of Alexandria was largely positive.
“The ARPA funding made possible by President Biden positioned Alexandria, its residents, and businesses to thrive in the years to come,” Parajon said.
Photo via White House/Twitter
