April 2009

The AIA/CAE continues to be very active on the advocacy front as we move pass the short term impact of the stimulus package and move into a longer term discussion about federal levels of involvement in school construction and design. On March 20th, I attended a meeting at AIA headquarters in Washington, DC of the coalition brought together by AIA and CEFPI on behalf of school design and construction professionals. The meeting was attended by representatives of more than 30 design, construction, advocacy, and material vendor organizations to discuss how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) can benefit school design and construction. With the passage of ARRA, more than $70 billion in federal dollars was allocated in ways that can benefit our industry. AIA was a leader in the advocacy efforts to get the bill passed and continues to work with congress, the administration and the Department of Education to explore ways of making a difference with this money. The meeting served as a briefing for the coalition members on the opportunities in ARRA and the status of its implementation.

There are many good resources to identify how you might help your clients access some of this money. The best summary is available at the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities, a longtime AIA/CAE partner and warehouse for tremendous amounts of information on school planning, design and construction. The Department of Education also has several resources. Finally, the administrations web site, www.recovery.gov, has a full and very detailed breakdown of the stimulus package as a whole. We continue to encourage you to work closely with your state leaders on how the stimulus money gets distributed. Each state is supposed to have a stimulus czar in charge of overseeing the allocation of the federal dollars. Find your state’s stimulus czar and connect with them.

Beyond ARRA, we continue to have discussions with the Department of Education on how we can use federal dollars to invest in innovative school designs around the country. We expect these discussions will be very long term and will involve a lot of the organizations that are a part of the coalition. We commit to keeping you informed about our progress as we move forward. As of today, we are still in the early stages of the discussion. Any thoughts/ideas on this would be greatly appreciated. - Tim Dufault, AIA, 2009 Chair of the Committee on Architecture for Education

February 2009

This is an excerpt from the Congressional report that accompanies the final version of H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic recovery bill that was signed into law by President Obama. For more information contact AIA Government Advocacy.