Part Two: The 21st Century Agenda for Cities and Suburbs

The Administration's FY2000 budget proposes $1 billion in new investments to help build livable communities for the 21st century. These proposals, which build on the Administration's Livable Communities initiative, would provide communities with new tools and resources to revitalize urban neighborhoods, ease traffic congestion, save farms and other green space, develop regional partnerships, and pursue other "smart growth" strategies. They complement the $1 billion Lands Legacy initiative also proposed in the Administration's FY2000 budget.

The Livable Communities initiative is designed to broaden the choices available to communities and to help empower them to:

• Sustain prosperity and expand economic opportunity

• Ensure all members of the community can share in this prosperity and opportunity

• Enhance the quality of life

• Build a stronger sense of community

Better America Bonds. Urban redevelopment efforts will also get a boost from a new Administration initiative -- Better America Bonds -- providing a new financing tool for State and local governments to clean up abandoned industrial sites, preserve green space, create or restore urban parks, and protect water quality. The initiative is designed to generate $9.5 billion in bond authority for such investments over 5 years. The FY2000 budget proposes tax credits totaling almost $700 million over 5 years to support the Bonds. The program will be administered jointly by the Department of the Treasury and EPA.

Regional Connections. This initiative would provide $50 million to HUD in FY2000 to fund local partnerships to develop and implement locally driven smarter growth strategies that address economic and community development needs across jurisdictional lines. Broadly speaking, such strategies will include incentives for coordinated reinvestment in already built-up and infrastructure-rich areas -- especially central cities and older suburbs -- and growth alternatives in newly developing cities. Participating regions will be asked to outline strategies for managing the economy and workforce in ways that reinforce the overall development strategy. Eligible lead applicants will include consortia of States and localities working in active partnerships with the private sector, nonprofit institutions, and community groups, as well as with regional institutions such as councils of government, regional councils, and metropolitan planning organizations. Flexible dollars to strengthen institutions and develop high-impact regional projects are the hardest to come by for most regions. (This year's request is for a separate program with its own appropriation rather than as a set-aside in the CDBG program, as proposed last year.)

Community Transportation Choices. To help ease traffic congestion, the Department of Transportation budget for FY2000 proposes a record $6.1 billion for public transit and $2.7 billion -- a total 16-percent increase over FY99 -- to aggressively implement innovative community-based programs in the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, including $1.8 billion for the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program to help communities meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act.

The proposal includes a proposed $48 billion for the Transportation and Community and System Preservation Pilot (TCSP), which helps States and local communities develop strategies that improve the efficiency of the transportation system, minimize environmental impacts of transportation, and reduce the need for costly public infrastructure investments such as building major new urban highways or rail systems.

Redevelopment of Abandoned Buildings Initiative. One of the primary causes of blight in urban neighborhoods is abandoned apartment buildings, homes, warehouses, offices, and commercial centers. Through this new initiative, which will receive $50 million in the Administration's FY2000 budget, HUD will provide competitive grants to local governments to support the removal of abandoned buildings as part of a holistic plan to redevelop properties for commercial use, housing, open space, or other productive community use. Such plans will require significant private sector participation. Eliminating non-historic abandoned buildings for which rehabilitation is not feasible will give these areas new hope by shifting their direction from deterioration to development.

Regional Crime Data Sharing. The Administration's FY2000 budget proposes $125 million to expand programs which help communities share information to improve public safety. These programs will improve and continue to computerize national, State, and local criminal history records and develop or upgrade local communications technologies and criminal justice identification systems to help local law enforcement share information in a timely manner.

Community-Centered Schools. The Administration proposes a new $10 million grant program administered by the Department of Education to encourage school districts to involve the community in planning and designing new schools.

Community/Federal Information Partnership (C/FIP). This program will make new information tools, such as geographic information systems (GIS) technology, more readily available at the local level to help communities make informed, collaborative decisions about regional growth. The C/FIP includes the 15 federal agencies that make up the Federal Geographic Data Committee, chaired by the Secretary of the Interior, working in partnership with State, local and tribal governments, the academic community, and the private sector. The National Partnership for Reinventing Government -- in cooperation with the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and the Environmental Protection Agency -- is sponsoring six pilot projects to demonstrate how geospatial data and maps from various government agencies can enhance community decision making on local issues ranging from crime control to water quality management. The FY2000 budget requests $39.5 million for C/FIP, distributed among six agencies.

An existing program that has been at the forefront of efforts to promote smarter growth and livable communities is HUD's Brownfields Redevelopment program (see Opening Doors to New Markets above).

The Agenda also includes existing measures to continue the advances most communities are making public safety improvements, strengthen schools, and protect and preserve the natural environment and historic amenities that enrich communities' quality of life:

21st Century Policing. Communities must be safe to attract new residents and businesses and to create a sense of place. On this front, the Nation has made much progress. Serious crime is down 6 years in a row. The murder rate has fallen more than 28 percent to its lowest point in three decades. But there is still much to be done to stop crime and further improve the investment climate in urban neighborhoods. The FY2000 budget proposes a new 21st Century Policing Initiative to enhance Federal anti-crime capabilities and empower States and communities, which play the central role in controlling crime -- particularly violent crime.

A centerpiece of the $1.28 billion initiative is a program to put More Police on the Streets. The FY2000 budget provides $600 million to help communities hire and redeploy 30,000 to 50,000 more law enforcement officers over 5 years, especially in crime hot spots. About $20 million will fund programs to combat violence in schools. The FY2000 budget also provides a $350 million Crime-Fighting Technology initiative to help State and local enforcement agencies use new technologies to communicate more effectively, solve more crimes, and conduct comprehensive crime analyses. The initiative will promote better compatibility among criminal justice agencies and foster improvement of the forensic science capabilities of State and local laboratories. The FY2000 budget provides $200 million to hire, redeploy, or train Community-Based Prosecutors who will interact directly with the community to fight crime on a proactive basis. And $125 million would be provided for Community Crime Prevention to engage entire communities in preventing and fighting crime, including community residents, probation and parole officers, faith-based organizations, and the private sector. In addition, the Administration's budget requests $2.5 million to establish Safe Communities, community-based injury-control programs that address transportation safety problems at the local level.

Strengthening Our Schools. While education is primarily a State and local responsibility, the Federal Government has a crucial role to play in supporting education from preschool through adulthood. Urban school systems are finally showing signs of improvement, but much more remains to be done. City schools are still failing to prepare an alarming number of children to meet the challenges of the new high-technology economy. Disproportionately, minority children are paying the highest price. In 1997 more than 81 percent of urban schools had a student population that was at least 70 percent poor and 50 percent minority.

In addition, lagging urban educational systems remain the single most important impediment facing cities trying to attract and keep middle- and upper-income residents. Put another way, strategies to curb unchecked growth patterns and facilitate more growth in already-developed areas must be accompanied by aggressive measures to address remaining shortcomings in urban schools.

A centerpiece of the Administration's FY2000 budget is a New Classrooms and Modernized Schools initiative to provide Federal tax credits to pay interest on nearly $25 billion in bonds to build and renovate public schools. Two types of bonds are being proposed: School Modernization Bonds ($22.4 billion) and Qualified Zone Academy Bonds ($2.4 billion). The tax credits on these bonds will cost the U.S. Treasury a total of $3.7 billion over 5 years.

The FY2000 budget also provides $1.4 billion as the second installment of the President's plan to help schools recruit, hire, and train 100,000 new teachers by 2005 and reduce class size in the early grades. In addition, the budget provides $115 million to help improve the quality of teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities, including $35 million in scholarships and other support for 7,000 prospective teachers who commit to teach in high-poverty schools. The budget includes $18 million to expand the Troops to Teachers program and $10 million to train and recruit 1,000 new Native American teachers over the next 5 years.

The FY2000 budget ensures teachers can integrate technology effectively into their instruction by providing $450 million for the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund and $65 million for Community-Based Technology Centers. The Pre-Service Teacher Training in Technology initiative will receive $75 million and $30 million will be provided for a new Middle School Teacher Training initiative to train technology experts. In addition, $1.3 billion will be made available through the education rate program -- E-rate -- created under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. E-rate provides discounts for schools and libraries to buy high-speed Internet access, internal wiring, and telecommunications services.

Experts agree that school-age children who are unsupervised after school are far more likely to use alcohol, drugs, and tobacco; commit crimes; earn poor grades; and drop out of school than those who are involved in supervised, constructive activities. The FY2000 budget proposes to triple funding for the 21st Century Learning Center Program, which supports after-school and summer school programs nationwide. The initiative funds programs that use public school facilities and existing resources. In awarding these new funds, the U.S. Department of Education will give priority to school districts that are ending social promotions. The FY2000 budget includes $600 million to help 1.1 million children each year participate in after-school and summer school programs.

Lands Legacy Initiative. A key component of building strong communities is to protect and preserve the natural environment and historic treasures. The FY2000 budget proposes a $1 billion Lands Legacy Initiative for the protection of America's land and coastal resources. This initiative renews America's commitment to its natural environment. It will fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund for the first time, requesting $900 million, and provide $442 million to protect natural and historic sites, including critical lands in the Mojave Desert and Florida's Everglades, Civil War battlefields, and the Lewis and Clark Trail.

The Lands Legacy Initiative provides $588 million to State and local governments to encourage open-space planning, protect threatened farmland and coastal areas, restore urban parks and forests, and safeguard endangered species. Open Space Planning Grants will go to State, regional, and local governments to help them develop smarter growth strategies. Priority for the $50 million in open-space grants will go to proposals that link State open-space protection plans to regional strategies for balancing growth, land use, infrastructure development, and quality-of-life concerns. Land Conservation Grants at a $150 million level will be provided to help State and local governments acquire land and easements for open spaces, greenways, outdoor recreation, urban parks, wildlife habitat, and coastal wetlands. And under the Urban Parks Recreation Program, the Federal Government will provide $4 million in matching grants and technical assistance for the restoration of parks in economically distressed urban communities. The urban parks program, administered by the National Park Service, awarded more than 1,200 grants from 1978 to 1995, but it has not been funded since 1995.

Fifty million dollars for the Farmland Protection Program would provide matching grants to States and communities to purchase permanent easements of farmland threatened by development, to help preserve green space around urban and suburban areas. An additional $40 million for Urban and Community Forestry grants would help cities establish and expand green spaces within the community.