Erie, Pennsylvania could use a facelift. The lakefront city of 100,000 has been adding jobs and businesses downtown, but it remains saddled with vestiges of its industrial past: abandoned factories, ugly concrete buildings, decaying houses.

Leaders have written a stack of development plans, but lack the money needed to turn them into reality.

Now their dreams seem possible. Congress last year passed President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure law, which provides $550 billion in new funding for bridge repair, environmental cleanup and other projects that could transform places like Erie.

It amounts to the largest U.S. public-works surge since the 1960s, but there is no guarantee those dollars will make it to Erie. Roughly half of the funds will flow through state governments, while the rest will be doled out on a competitive basis.

To win the money, local governments will have to apply for it — and after decades of belt tightening, many lack the bureaucratic muscle to do so.

“Nobody is ready because nobody has needed to be ready until now,” said Perry Wood, executive director of the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, which distributes gambling money for redevelopment projects.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic two years ago, local governments have shed 3.7% of their administrative jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Some have had trouble handling the $500 billion in COVID-19 aid that Washington has sent to local governments. One out of five communities in Michigan missed out on the initial round of federal coronavirus aid because they didn’t know how to fill out the paperwork, said Shanna Draheim of the Michigan Municipal League.

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