(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 448: A Bootcamp for Infrastructure

This week we’re joined by Dr. Robert Blaine of the National League of Cities. We talk about their work helping smaller cities apply for federal infrastructure grants through a bootcamp program and chat about local grant writing capacity and what success looks like.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our archives page.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (41s):
Dr. Robert Blaine, welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast.

Dr. Robert Blaine (1m 14s):
Thank you so much. It’s a wonderful opportunity to join you today.

Jeff Wood (1m 17s):
Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Robert Blaine (1m 21s):
Sure. I’m a senior executive at the National League of Cities, and I lead a center that’s actually called lead. It’s an acronym that stands for Leadership, education, advancement and Development. Inside of Lead, we have three units. We have our technical assistance unit that’s called the Institute for Youth Education and Families, and we work with cities around the country to try and create opportunity for residents. And then we have what’s called N L C University, which really thinks about the kinds of leadership skills that we want to be able to support in leaders. And then finally we have the local infrastructure hub, which is what we’re gonna talk about today, which is really focused on trying to drive infrastructure dollars towards underserved communities.

Jeff Wood (2m 3s):
How did you get to be interested in what you’re interested now in terms of cities, in terms of living in places, et cetera? I’m curious about some of your background.

Dr. Robert Blaine (2m 10s):
Yeah, so before coming to the National League of Cities, I was the chief administrative officer for the city of Jackson, Mississippi. So essentially that’s like a city manager. So I I, I ran a city for four years, which was an incredibly eye-opening experience and taught me a lot about municipal government and really thinking about how government can improve the quality of life for people in a city. One of the things that Mayor Quay and Lumumba and I did was we developed a, a strategic plan. We called it an economic model of human dignity and really thinking about what dignity looked like in a city and how we could invest in, in ways that promoted the dignity of every citizen in the city.

Dr. Robert Blaine (2m 53s):
And before that, I was actually in academics, so I was a provost at a small college and dean at a university. Before that, I was the dean of undergraduate studies and cyber learning, which is a totally made up title, but it speaks to the way that students learn today as opposed to the way that they might’ve learned back in the stone ages when I was in school. And so, you know, thinking about how students live in a, an environment of ubiquitous information and how did they use information to create new knowledge was really the ways that we were thinking. But really the truth is that I’m trained for absolutely none of this because in real life I wave a stick for a living.

Dr. Robert Blaine (3m 33s):
I’m actually an orchestra conductor, and I was actually trained at music conservatories. And the first part of my career was conducting and performing in professional orchestras in different parts of the world.

Jeff Wood (3m 45s):
Now there must be things that, you know, from conducting orchestras and music that have played into the way that you interact with people in cities or interact with cities themselves, I’m guessing.

Dr. Robert Blaine (3m 56s):
Absolutely, yeah. One of the quotes that I love is actually from Leonard Bernstein, and he says that the conductor is the least powerful person in the room. His instrument makes no noise. I have a baton and I can’t hit anybody with it. He said his instrument makes no noise, yet he must convince those with the power to conform to his vision. And this is achieved by giving each artist room for their individual expression within the vision of the whole. And I really think of that as the way that I work with teams and work with cities. It’s really about trying to help create a big vision that everybody can fit into, and then really think about how there’s room for every artist to really think about how they live into that vision and what that means in order to be able to create opportunity and growth and what that looks like for residents.

Jeff Wood (4m 45s):
Well, that sounds like it fits right in with what you’re doing with the National League of Cities specifically. Well, let’s talk about the local infrastructure hub and the funding bootcamps for smaller communities. I’m wondering what constitutes a smaller community and what are some of the struggles that these smaller communities face in terms of trying to access funding for infrastructure or other items?

Dr. Robert Blaine (5m 4s):
Sure. Well, what we’ve defined small and midsize communities as cities that are 150,000 residents and below. So this is literally towns and villages that may have a thousand residents up to a, a nice midsize city that may have 150,000 residents. When I was the chief administrative officer in Jackson, we had right about 170,000 residents in the city. And in the entire municipal government, I had two and a half grant writers. I had one in the planning department that was writing, you know, HUD grants for C D B G and all kinds of programs like that.

Dr. Robert Blaine (5m 45s):
I had one in public safety, and most of the public safety grants were around policing and militarization of the police, which was the exact opposite direction of where we wanted to go. And I had a half a grant writer in the Public works department where we had the most challenges and needed the most help. You may have heard about Jackson, Mississippi and the news recently with the water crisis that we had there and some of the challenges that we had with infrastructure. But the, the real challenge for us was that after decades and decades of deferred maintenance, because there was no funding to be able to support that maintenance, when new opportunities came and new funding streams came, it was difficult for us to compete because many of these federal programs were programs that we had to apply for, and we needed federal grant writers in order to be able to apply for those funding.

Dr. Robert Blaine (6m 39s):
So we were in this kind of catch 22. We really, really needed the funds, but we didn’t have the, the competency, we didn’t have the capacity to be able to apply for it. And so I don’t think that Jackson is dissimilar from other cities or other midsize cities. And so, you know, as we thought about this as the National League of Cities, what we saw in this huge opportunity that we have with the funding that’s come out through the bipartisan infrastructure law, the American Rescue Plan, what’s happening now with the CHIPS Act and I r a, there’s trillions of dollars that are available. But what’s historically happened with these funding programs is that they’ve gone to the cities that have the big grant writing teams that can actually apply for the dollars.

Dr. Robert Blaine (7m 26s):
And so what we said was that we wanted to be able to think about how we were, could help create a more equitable distribution of funds. And so to that end, we thought about this local infrastructure hub, of course, with our other partners, but to really think about how we could support small to mid-size cities who have not historically been able to garner these funds in the same amounts that the big cities had. And how do we provide some resources so that some of these funds that are coming down can be more equitably distributed.

Jeff Wood (8m 1s):
It’s interesting because like you said, this has been such a, a problem for a long period of time. There’s been so much money sloshing around for decades, federal programs, probably even state programs that haven’t been funded even here in California. I mean, in Oakland, we’ve talked many times on the show about Oakland Transportation Department not being able to get the funds they need for paving or things from the state because they don’t have the grant writers available, or they didn’t have the people available to do that. So I’m wondering also, you know, you’ve done a few of these bootcamps and we’ll talk about the process and the programs in a second. But I’m wondering kind of the makeup of the folks that have come into the bootcamps, like how, how big are these cities? What is their capacity like currently, and what is the main, you know, barrier for them? And, and in Jackson you had some grant writers, which actually might be lucky that you had a few rather than none.

Dr. Robert Blaine (8m 44s):
That’s right, that’s right. So, you know, what we’ve seen is that we’ve had, you know, communities as small as a thousand up to, you know, 160, 170,000 that have been in the program. And for many of the really, really small communities, they just don’t have anybody on staff that does this full-time. So many times it’s a department director that might be taking on this responsibility. We even had a mayor in a city that was writing grants for, for their city. And so she was a new mayor that came in and she was like, I don’t have anybody to write the grants, so I’m gonna write ’em myself. You know, and I think that the exciting thing about what we’ve done is we’ve built this curriculum and the goal is that we’re teaching cities the process of how to complete a competitive application, and we’re trying to build all the resources that they need.

Dr. Robert Blaine (9m 36s):
So even if they don’t have someone who is a full-time grant writer, you could take a department director or someone in the city, or even a partner, even like a community-based organization that can be a partner that could add support to a city. And together you can create a competitive application.

Jeff Wood (9m 54s):
Why are the applications so hard that you actually need grant writers, right? Like, why do we create these systems that make it so that we have to get extra resources to get resources?

Dr. Robert Blaine (10m 4s):
That’s such a great question. That’s such a great question. Well, I mean, you know, the federal government, one of the things that I’ve realized working in a city is that there’s a, a large, a part of your job that is focused on trying to reduce misappropriation. And it’s unfortunate, but so much of the regulatory en environment is around trying to make sure that these funds are gonna gonna be used in the right way. And so I think that definitely the system is burdensome and overly burdensome in many cases. But I think that the, the reason that it’s become so overly burdensome is because we’ve had regulation after regulation after regulation trying to ensure that these dollars are actually going towards the right cause they’re gonna be spent in the right way, and that cities have the capacity to actually execute on the projects that they’re proposing.

Jeff Wood (10m 57s):
Does that make it harder to do good projects because of that? I mean, I’m not saying that that’s wrong because obviously we’ve had these issues for a long time where, you know, graft and, and corruption and those types of things obviously come into play and the federal government wants to make sure the money is spent correctly. Correct. But it also might, you know, be stacks and stacks and stacks of regulations that make it actually harder to do projects, especially in smaller cities.

Dr. Robert Blaine (11m 19s):
It is. You know, I think that one of the things that’s exciting about the bipartisan infrastructure law is that this is probably one of the most flexible sets of programs I’ve seen in a long time. When the American Rescue Plan passed, I think that was the most flexible I had ever seen. And b i l has elements of the, the American Rescue plan in it. And one of the things that I think is really, really exciting about the bipartisan infrastructure law is that it’s one of the first times that the federal government has actually stipulated equity as a focus of the work, right? And so when you think about Justice 40 and the way that they’ve structured these conversations about equity, it’s the first time that a lot of these agencies have ever even had to worry about what an equitable program looks like and the ways that they think about equitable distribution.

Dr. Robert Blaine (12m 15s):
So I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there, which is really exciting. And it’s also one of the main reasons that we wanted to be a part of this, because we also felt that equitable distribution was an important piece and trying to make sure that dollars are flowing to some of the communities that need it, the absolute most.

Jeff Wood (12m 34s):
There’s approximately 400 different funding opportunities in the infrastructure bill alone. How overwhelming is just finding the program that actually works for you?

Dr. Robert Blaine (12m 43s):
It’s a huge thing. So what we’ve done with the local infrastructure hub is to focus on 30 programs out of the bipartisan infrastructure law. And so we selected that, those 30 by thinking about first of all programs that cities could apply for directly to the federal government. There’s a few programs that they have to apply through the state, but the majority are, are direct funding opportunities. The second was that we wanted to think about programs that could have the greatest amount of impact, right? So what’s the biggest bang for the buck that you could, that you could, you could achieve with these programs? And then the third was that we were looking for programs where there was the greatest amount of dollars available, so not just what the capacity or the impact could be in that local community, but how many communities could participate in that.

Dr. Robert Blaine (13m 34s):
And so using those three criteria, we narrowed down from the 400 programs down to 30 that we thought would be super effective for cities to be able to apply for. And so the local infrastructure hub, our bootcamps are focused on those 30 programs.

Jeff Wood (13m 51s):
So tell me a little bit more about the bootcamps. I’m interested to hear like what the process is for getting people involved, and then also, you know, is there a set group of skills that you’re teaching folks? Is there like a set group of programs that you’re focused on? I’m interested in in how that works.

Dr. Robert Blaine (14m 6s):
Absolutely. So my background again, is higher education. So it’s kind of set up like a, like an online course. Each course is basically four months long. If you think about that, four months, like a college semester, there are five courses that happen within that semester. So each one of those courses is a different program out of the bipartisan infrastructure law. So for example, in our first phase of, of programs, we had five grants that we were teaching. We did the Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation grant, which is called the Smart Grant. We did Brownfield Building Resilient Infrastructure in Communities, which is called the Brick Grant, the Flood Mitigation Program.

Dr. Robert Blaine (14m 49s):
So all of these are, each one of these is a separate course that’s happening, and we organize the course through this modular system. So there are eight modules, and we essentially walk a city through each section of the grant application in a module. So let’s say for example, you are in the budget section of the grant, which is I think either module four or module five, we’ll have what we call a peer learning section, which is like a college lecture, right? It’s introducing you to the topic, it’s telling you all about the budget and how it’s, how it’s constructed. And then we actually build out a template of the budget for you that’s got some pieces already filled out, right?

Dr. Robert Blaine (15m 32s):
So it’s a little bit pre-populated. You take that template after you finish that peer learning session, and you start putting your numbers in for your project. Well, then the next week we have a small group, right? So we take the big lecture and we break it into smaller groups. These are called our coaching sessions. And in that coaching session, we’ll actually work with you on that budget template that you were trying to build. And we’ll go through and take a few examples from a few different cities and say, oh, well, you know, your in kind needs to go here, or, you know, you need to think about how you’re gonna match these dollars over here, or this is how you’re constructing the project. And then from there, if a city still has questions, we have what are called office hours, and these are one-on-one support sessions with a subject matter expert.

Dr. Robert Blaine (16m 23s):
It’s essentially having a, a, a consultant for free. And so they then meet one-on-one and they will go through and redline the entire budget for them and say, no, you need to do X, Y, and Z. The goal is that in each one of these modules, we’ve tried to set it up so that we can almost guarantee that if you follow all the steps, you will get a hundred percent of the points that are available for each one of these topic areas. And so we do that through every single module, which is every single part of the grant application. And our goal is that we’re working with communities to try and get a hundred percent, a hundred points on that application, because these are competitive dollars.

Dr. Robert Blaine (17m 7s):
It used to be, you know, years ago, if you scored 94 or 95 or 96, you could pretty much get funded, but there are so many communities that are competing for these dollars, they really have to get a hundred percent. And so our, our goal in working with them is to walk them through the process of creating this competitive application over the course of four months. And at the end of the course, it coincides with the submission date for that grant program. So by the time you get to module seven, you should be ready to hit submit, and hopefully you get funded. And module eight is about how you actually start to be compliant with the funds once you’ve, once you’ve become been funded,

Jeff Wood (17m 49s):
What’s the part that folks might have the most difficulty with?

Dr. Robert Blaine (17m 53s):
So one of the big challenges for communities is data. A lot of these smaller communities don’t have the data that they need to really create these competitive applications. So one of the things that we did was we created a big data tool, and we actually built it out for 25,000 cities, towns, and villages across the entire country. So literally every city, town and village in the entire country is covered in this big data tool. And then we took hundreds of different indicators, indices of health or economics or education or environment.

Dr. Robert Blaine (18m 34s):
And all of these di indices are disaggregated down to the census track level. So we can go community by community census, track by census, track and measure what all the disparities are across a community. What that does is it gives us a lens to be able to say, these are the parts of the community and these are the communities that need these dollars the most. And this is how this program could align in order to be able to support these communities. And if this program is funded, this is how these communities would be improved by this type of federal funding. So, you know, that level of data and detail is something that cities most cities don’t have. It was a tool that I didn’t have when I was, you know, managing a state capital that was, you know, the largest city in the state.

Dr. Robert Blaine (19m 21s):
So it’s, it’s a, it’s a level of, of data architecture and support that many of these communities really need.

Jeff Wood (19m 28s):
Yeah, it’s really important. One of the things I used to do with the nonprofit I used to work for was, you know, collect g i s data and, you know, census data and, and go through the a c s and all that stuff and pull out information for cities. And it, it was amazing how much, you know, a little bit of information would help folks recenter an idea or think about a plan. So I think that’s really important. I imagine that those are the same kind of data pieces that you all are using the census and things like that,

Dr. Robert Blaine (19m 50s):
Those and others. So, you know, there are tens and tens of, of different data sources that we’re using. And essentially this tool is an aggregator of all of those sources into one big map of the entire country. And, you know, one of the things that I think is really exciting is that many cities will go into this and they’ll be thinking of one program or, or one way to look at the program, and then they’ll actually see what the data is telling them, and it often will shift and they’ll think differently about what their priorities are and how they’re using, how they could use the funding to align with their priorities. We were talking with a community, I think they were in Arizona, and it was a rather affluent community, and they were thinking about transportation issues.

Dr. Robert Blaine (20m 37s):
And one of the things they were saying was that, well, we’re not really a disadvantaged community, so we might not be in the priority for this grant program. And then when we looked at the tool, we were able to see that their neighbors were native communities that were disadvantaged. And so they created a partnership right across their barriers. And what it did was that transportation program that they were bi what that they were thinking of actually connected some of these underserved communities with the resources that they had. You know, how do you connect to medical resources and healthcare, and how do you connect to grocery shopping for fresh foods?

Dr. Robert Blaine (21m 20s):
And all of these things that transportation program would’ve not only helped their community, but the neighboring community connect to resources as well.

Jeff Wood (21m 30s):
That’s awesome. The other thing that’s been interesting reading about the program too, is that you all connect people with peers and connect people with experts. And I think that that’s a very interesting and important part of this all as well.

Dr. Robert Blaine (21m 42s):
Absolutely. So every one of those modules that I was talking about before, we have a subject matter expert that’s actually leading those sessions. And so we have our course delivery team who are basically educators. Their focus is adult education, but then we bring in the content experts. And what they do is really think about if you’re thinking of, for example, your community engagement strategy, well then we, we’ve partnered with a group that does community engagement all over the country, and they have a whole rubric of how they think about community engagement and the way that needs to be presented in your application and the ways that you want to think about this continuum, right?

Dr. Robert Blaine (22m 24s):
From all the way from informing communities to co-creation, right? And where are you on that continuum? How do you understand that? And then how do you fold that into your application? So every module that we have in the curriculum, we bring a subject matter expert to the table to really bring that expertise. And one of the really exciting thing is that when those office hours are available, you’re one-on-one consulting with a subject matter expert that can really help you craft exactly what you need out of your application.

Jeff Wood (22m 54s):
Do you have a favorite segment or module or application that kind of stands out to you

Dr. Robert Blaine (23m 2s):
That’s like, that’s like asking what your favorite child is?

Jeff Wood (23m 6s):
I have to ask the question. I have to,

Dr. Robert Blaine (23m 8s):
I love them all.

Jeff Wood (23m 9s):
I do this to people all the time, and they, they get mad at me, but I have to ask it. No,

Dr. Robert Blaine (23m 12s):
No, I, I, I love, it’s a great question. And I, and they are, they are really all fantastic. I think that for me, data is something that’s really close to me. And thinking about data-driven outcomes and how we can use data to really drive dollars towards the communities that are in, in greatest need, to me, that’s super powerful. But, you know, data is not just in the module that, that is our data module. It flows through the entire, the entire course and the entire application. So, but I think that this whole piece about thinking about data and how that can be used as a lever to be able to invest intentionally in communities is something that’s really exciting.

Jeff Wood (23m 54s):
Do you have a favorite topic area like Bridges or the Reconnecting Communities program or anything along those lines?

Dr. Robert Blaine (24m 1s):
Again, you know, it, it’s your favorite child, But you know, it’s funny because every city has a different issue and you know, you might think that it’s drinking water in one community and then it might be bridges in another and railroad crossings at at a third. But what I think is really exciting about this is that because we have every four months we’re bringing out a new semester with a new five programs, it creates an incredible amount of flexibility for a city to be able to see the full gamut of what’s available, and then to really think intentionally about what makes sense for their community, and then how do they connect with the program that’s gonna help them the most.

Jeff Wood (24m 47s):
How many of these have you been through? Like you have different ones each time?

Dr. Robert Blaine (24m 51s):
Yeah, so we’ve been through three phases. We’re, we’re in the middle of our third phase right now. And so that essentially is our first year. And so we’ll have one more year that we’ll go through. And so we’ll have another three phases that we’ll launch next year. And it’s really exciting because, you know, it’s grown each year we’re seeing, seeing more and more cities that are actually completing applications with each each phase. And we’ve been able to do this at a scale that we’ve never seen before. And you know, in our current phase, we have almost 250 cities that are participating across these five programs. And one of the impact pieces that really excited me was that when we looked across the first phase, what we saw was a city was 300% more likely to get federal funding if they went through the boot camps.

Dr. Robert Blaine (25m 45s):
So I think it, what it shows is that the efficiency of an efficacy of these subject matter experts and the assist kinds of assistance that they’re getting, and many of these communities would be communities that would not have been able to compete before, and now they’re 300% more likely to get grant funding. I thought that was like, it spoke to the significance of the work.

Jeff Wood (26m 8s):
What does this mean politically? I mean, am I talking small P or or large p I don’t know, but like in the general sense, because a lot of these communities weren’t able to get funding before, and so maybe they might have looked at these federal programs like, well, why are we doing these programs? We’re never gonna get the money anyway. Right? And why am I, you know, voting for X person, whatever. I’m just curious what the impact might be from that perspective.

Dr. Robert Blaine (26m 28s):
Yeah, so from the standpoint of the National League of Cities, we are always advocating from the standpoint of locality, right? The government that’s closest to people, it tends to be the most impactful on their lives. And so when the American rescue plan was being conceived, one of the things that we lobbied for was the state and local fiscal re relief relief fund and thinking about direct aid to cities. How do we get dollars directly into the hands of city officials? And one of the things that we were really pleased with, with the bipartisan infrastructure laws, that many of the programs followed that same model.

Dr. Robert Blaine (27m 8s):
And so now that these funding streams were available to go directly into a locality, and I think that from the political standpoint, the efficacy of those dollars at a local level and the impact that they create in local communities and the better distribution of those funds across communities gives us leverage to go back to the federal government and say that this formula needs to be replicated, right? So, you know, the, the next opportunity that we have for a funding program, we need to really think about how we can most equitably distribute those dollars and use a funding formula that’s gonna allow those dollars to really get to the communities that need it the most.

Dr. Robert Blaine (27m 54s):
And to see that kind of growth as opposed to this kind of trickle down model that’s come from the federal to the state, and then hopefully trickling down to the local level.

Jeff Wood (28m 5s):
Yeah. From a resource perspective, you all are funded through philanthropy and, and other methods for this program because likely they saw opportunity to make these differences in, in smaller communities. But I’m wondering if you are to scale it larger and make it so that more groups can actually apply for federal grants. I mean, how would you do that? Like, what would be the ways that you’d make this a larger program? Would it be operated by the federal government or maybe state government, or would it be something that’s still, you know, funded through philanthropy? What would be like a process of making this more ubiquitous?

Dr. Robert Blaine (28m 38s):
So, you know, it’s interesting. When we started this work, we, when we started conceiving this work, we actually went to the federal government and said, we would love to partner with you directly. And you know, we, we met with the a RPAs czar and the czar of the bipartisan infrastructure law. And the way that the laws had been written, the money went straight to agencies and there was not a lot of money for technical assistance. And essentially that’s what we’re doing is technical assistance. And so they pointed us in the direction of philanthropy. And so, you know, we’ve had wonderful partners in Bloomberg Philanthropies who have been our main partners in this work, and they’ve brought together a consortium of other funders that have come together to fund the work.

Dr. Robert Blaine (29m 24s):
But I do think that your point about replication and scale for future opportunities is really important. I really believe that this is a model of how funding can be distributed more equitably. And if that could be taken up at the federal level, I think that those resources could be used to really think about what national scale looks like. It’s been exciting. We’ve worked with, you know, over a thousand cities just in our first year, but there are 25,000 cities, towns, and villages in the country, right? And, and while every single one of those cities, towns, and villages are not necessarily focused on every one of these funding streams, there is definitely an opportunity to scale to a greater degree.

Dr. Robert Blaine (30m 9s):
And we would love to see this program continue to scale. We have the capacity to take many more cities through this curriculum and to help build their capacities. And one of the things that I think is really a fundamental part of the work is that our goal is not to just teach a city how to apply for this one funding program, but really teach them the skillset of being able to apply for federal funding, which allows them to replicate this process for future opportunities as well. So hopefully we’re not just giving them a fish of applying for this one program, but truly teaching them how to fish for future opportunities as well.

Jeff Wood (30m 50s):
How do you know if the program is successful? It sounds like it’s already fairly successful, but how do you know if the program’s successful or not?

Dr. Robert Blaine (30m 56s):
The first metric for me is that cities applications are higher quality and that we have more cities that their applications are deemed acceptable, right? All of the acceptable applications are not necessarily funded. But what that means is that if they fall into that top category of acceptable programs, their opportunity to fund to be funded goes way up. And it’s just determined on how many dollars they have to distribute. So they kind of start at the top, and, you know, by the time they get to the middle, maybe they’ve run outta money and then they have to think about those communities in the next round of funding. But that’s the number one metric. The second metric is really thinking about communities that have not historically had this capacity, and now that they’ve built this capacity, they’re, they’re being funded for programs.

Dr. Robert Blaine (31m 47s):
So this is really thinking about redistribution, actually, right? How are we redistributing dollars so that they are flowing to the communities that have not historically been able to engage with these funding streams? And how many of those communities are the most disadvantaged communities? So, you know, right now we’re seeing that right at 51% of our participants are cities that have poverty rates a above the national average. And, and that’s really significant because of what that means is that those communities that would’ve been separated from these opportunities previously are now engaging and, and hopefully we’re helping them to get those dollars flowing into their communities.

Jeff Wood (32m 32s):
Was there something you learned that you didn’t expect to learn from this process?

Dr. Robert Blaine (32m 37s):
I think one of the things that I learned early on is that cities are really clear about what their needs are. They may not necessarily have connected those needs with a federal funding program, and that’s part of what we do. And then the last piece is that they may not have a project that is on the shelf ready to go, that they can immediately write a grant for. And so one of the learnings is that the pre-development process of working with a city to actually have a, what we like to call a shovel ready project that they can write a grant for, is something that we need to help more and more communities with because they have an idea of what they wanted to, they might’ve connected that with a, with a grant program.

Dr. Robert Blaine (33m 27s):
But unless you have an actual project that you can write an application for, you’re going through the process of education in general. And, and our goal is to be specific with it so that we’re helping them to write towards a specific program and a specific project that they have in their community.

Jeff Wood (33m 45s):
That’s so interesting because, you know, during the last recession, that was a big talking point with shovel-ready projects and trying to get money out the door so that they could spark work and all those types of things during the Obama administration. And I think that’s such an interesting idea that, you know, you can actually help communities figure out their shovel-ready projects and the things that they need and move forward with that. Yeah. What is next? Like how do you get more communities involved and like, what’s the next tranche of project types that folks are gonna be, you know, going through your program for?

Dr. Robert Blaine (34m 15s):
So we will start phase four on October 2nd, and in this next set of programs, we’ll be looking at essentially a set of climate programs. A lot of them are thinking about climate equity. We are going create something of a new phase where we, we’ll take some of the programs that we did in our earlier phases, in phases one and two, and we will build out a self-guided curriculum. So if there’s a city that wasn’t able to participate in the building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, we’ll actually have a self-guided track that they can go through so that we’ll have all the materials that we created and they can walk and we’ll actually navigate them through the process of, of a self-guided curriculum.

Dr. Robert Blaine (35m 2s):
We’ve also created a, a new track for cities that maybe got close to submitting an application but didn’t quite make it over the finish line. And so we’ve created a track where essentially we’ve put together a lot of consultant hours, all focused on trying to get them over the finish line. So you might’ve gotten close to fi completing your application, you needed some of these other pieces in order to get it done. Here are a bunch of consulting hours, we’re gonna try and get your application completed so that you’re ready to submit for the next, next round. So we’re, we’re trying to increase our offerings and diversify them so that we’re meeting the needs of all kinds of different cities, not just those that have, that are ready for the full four month long Bootcamp.

Jeff Wood (35m 51s):
Awesome. Well, how can folks find out more if they want to get involved or if they have a, a project they might be interested in shepherding through the process?

Dr. Robert Blaine (35m 58s):
Yeah, so our website is local infrastructure.org, and it’s called the local infrastructure hub. We’re marketing to the program literally every few months trying to get cities engaged. We’ll actually start registration for this next phase by the end of August, and we’ll begin the bootcamps, as I said in October. So one of the things that we’re, we’re really focusing on in this next set of programs is that, especially when we’re looking at these climate programs, you know, there’s climate plans that a city has to have there, there’s a lot of of research and background work that they need to be able to understand.

Dr. Robert Blaine (36m 41s):
And so we’re updating the data tools that we’ve built to so that they’re really addressing the needs of those communities. And one of the things that we’re, we’re trying to do is to make sure that we have all of that front loaded. So as soon as the city sits down in the Bootcamp, all of that data is ready to go for their community. And when they sit in that data module, they’ll know exactly how to build their, their climate plan, for example, for their community.

Jeff Wood (37m 7s):
That’s awesome. Well, Dr. Blaine, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Dr. Robert Blaine (37m 12s):
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a wonderful opportunity.