Civic organizations, foundations, and other nongovernmental organizations, together with the Administration, leaders from other sectors, and the Interagency Working Group on Sustainable Development Indicators, should sponsor a series of workshops to help citizens use to existing or new tools to track progress on sustainable community development. As part of this effort, the Council on Environmental Quality should chair a working group of representatives of the National Partnership to Reinvent Government, the Interagency Working Group on Sustainable Development Indicators, and the Federal Geographic Data Committee. The working group would provide technical assistance to communities and regions that wish to develop indicators, benchmarks, or other performance measures to assist local decision-making processes. The working group should work with the Joint Center for Sustainable Communities, which has launched a sustainable community indicators project, profiling city and country experiences with indicators. Federal agencies, organized by USDA, are working cooperatively with the Joint Center to better understand how community indicator efforts connect to regional and national indicator efforts.

The Administration should develop new economic statistics to measure reinvestment. As part of this effort, HUD and the U.S. Department of Commerce should develop statistical barometers. to capture reinvestment in the renovation of commercial and residential projects and brownfields redevelopment. Presently, government statistics track the economy and economic development based almost exclusively on new commercial and residential activities (such as housing starts); this practice discourages the financial and business sector from recognizing opportunities for sustainable community reinvestment.