Federally Assisted Areawide Planning:

Need To Simplify Policies and Practices

GGD-77-24: Published: Mar 28, 1977. Publicly Released: Mar 28, 1977.

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The Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968 recognized the interrelated nature of most federal planning programs and the need to coordinate them. Twenty federally assisted areawide planning programs were reviewed to determine whether the procedures of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-95 adequately carry out the purposes of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968.

OMB encouragement of the use of a single areawide organization to plan or to coordinate planning has not been effective because: (1) programs were initiated haphazardly to satisfy particular demands and each program built its own constituency at the state, areawide, and local level, which made it difficult for state and local governments to form a coordinated planning effort; (2) federal agencies often ignored the designated comprehensive planning agency; (3) the states sometimes disregarded their own planning subdivisions in implementing federal programs; and (4) federal agencies had varying requirements which created impediments to coordinated planning and made it difficult for one planning organization to satisfy all federal requirements.

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