This panel recommended potential urban designees to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In addition, all of the EZs have included public housing officials and public housing residents in planning and implementing the program. Involvement of Public Housing Officials and Residents

The EZ program requires the participation of various segments of the community, including the residents. The questionnaire asked the survey recipients to indicate the extent to which each factor had helped or hindered the program’s implementation. Factors That Helped the Program’s Implementation

Five factors were identified by more than half of the survey respondents as having helped them plan and implement the EZ program: community representation on the EZ governance boards, assistance from HUD’s contractors (called generalists), enhanced communication among stakeholders, support from the city’s mayor, and support from White House and cabinet-level officials. Factors That Constrained the Program’s Implementation

Six factors were frequently identified by survey respondents as having constrained their efforts to plan and implement the EZ program: difficulty in selecting an appropriate governance board structure, the additional layer of bureaucracy created by the state government’s involvement, preexisting relationships among EZ stakeholders, pressure for quick results from the media, the lack of federal funding for initial administrative activities, and pressure for quick results from the public and private sectors. All six of the urban EZs prepared strategic plans that include a section on evaluation. The benchmarks are revised, as needed, to reflect changes in the community and to include activities that will be performed after the first 2 years of the program. However, HUD and the EZs are not yet measuring performance in a way that allows them to assess how much progress is being made in satisfying the program’s four key principles because they have not yet (1) described measurable outcomes for the program’s key principles or (2) indicated how the outputs anticipated from one or more benchmarks will help to achieve those outcomes. Factors That Have Helped or Hindered the EZs’ Planning and Implementation Efforts

Scope and Methodology

To assess the status of HUD’s implementation of the six urban EZs and to describe the Department’s plans for evaluating the initiative, we interviewed officials from HUD and HHS who were responsible for the EZ program. GAO Comments

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Why GAO Did This Study

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) Program, focusing on the: (1) status of the program's implementation in the urban EZs, including the extent to which public housing officials and residents have been involved; (2) factors that participants believe have either helped or hindered efforts to carry out the program; and (3) plans for evaluating the program.

What GAO Found

GAO found that: (1) the six urban EZs reviewed resemble each other in some ways, but also differ in ways that reflect the diversity of the communities; (2) all of the EZs have included public housing authority officials in planning and implementing the program; (3) many officials involved in implementing the program generally agreed on factors that have either helped or hindered their efforts; (4) in a survey GAO conducted of program participants at the federal, state, and local levels, over half of the 27 program officials who responded agreed that community representation on the EZ governance boards, technical assistance provided by HUD's contractors, enhanced communication among stakeholders, and support from the city's mayor and from White House and cabinet-level officials had helped the program's implementation; (5) conversely, the difficulty in selecting a governance structure, the additional layer of bureaucracy created by the state government's involvement, preexisting relationships among EZ stakeholders, pressure for quick results, and the lack of federal funding for the program's initial administrative activities were frequently identified as factors constraining implementation; (6) HUD required each EZ to prepare a strategic plan indicating how it would satisfy the EZ program's four key principles and required the strategic plan to include realistic performance benchmarks for measuring progress in implementing the program; (7) all six of the urban EZs prepared strategic plans that include benchmarks describing the activities that the EZ planned to accomplish during the first 2 years of the program; and (8) HUD and the EZs have not yet described measurable outcomes for the program's key principles or indicated how the outputs anticipated from one or more benchmarks will help to achieve those outcomes.