Summary

The Weed and Seed Program is a community-based, multiagency program that seeks to "weed out" crime from targeted neighborhoods, then "seed" the area with various programs and resources to stop crime from recurring. The Justice Department considers the program to be an important part of its crime prevention efforts as well as a key part of the Clinton Administration's comprehensive community revitalization strategy. Weed and Seed sites develop partnerships with other federal, state, and local governments and private sector groups to augment federal Weed and Seed grant money with additional resources from these partners. These additional resources are intended to help sites become self-sufficient without Weed and Seed grant funds. This report assesses how (1) the program is managed by the Justice Department's Executive Office for Weed and Seed, (2) the Executive Office monitors local sites to ensure that grant requirements are met, (3) the Executive Office determines when sites have become self-sustaining, and (4) the Executive Office and sites are measuring the program's results.

GAO noted that: (1) EOWS has not established an adequate internal control requiring that significant program management decisions be documented; (2) without this control, EOWS management has not always fully documented EOWS decisions; (3) for example, in reviewing 12 of the 70 fiscal year (FY) 1999 new site qualification funding decisions, GAO found that for 5 of these 12 decisions, documentation was insufficient for GAO to determine how inconsistencies among external consultants and grant monitor recommendations and EOWS management decisions were reconciled; (4) in FY 1999, EOWS made decisions to qualify 164 of the existing 177 sites for continued funding, although in some cases, EOWS grant monitors recommended against additional funding; (5) however, available documentation was insufficient for GAO to determine the basis and rationale for EOWS' deciding to qualify these sites for continued funding; (6) for the remaining 13 sites that EOWS decided not to qualify for continued funding, documentation was sufficient to determine the basis and rationale for these decisions; (7) EOWS also did not always ensure that local Weed and Seed sites met critical grant requirements; (8) progress reports are an important tool to help EOWS management and grant monitors determine how sites are meeting program objectives and to assist in making future grant qualification decisions; (9) EOWS has not developed criteria to determine when sites have become self-sustaining and when to reduce or withdraw Weed and Seed funds, even though the goal of sites' becoming self-sustaining is central to the program; (10) while GAO identified actions that selected sites had taken toward self-sustainment, at the time of GAO's review, no site's funding had been reduced or withdrawn as a result of its efforts to become self-sustaining during the 9 years of the program's existence; (11) EOWS' performance indicators generally did not measure program results; (12) while GAO's review was in progress, EOWS changed some of its performance indicators in an attempt to better measure how well sites were meeting program objectives; (13) however, the revised indicators still primarily tracked program activity rather than results; (14) despite the general lack of performance indicators, most local officials with whom GAO spoke commented favorably on the activities funded by the local Weed and Seed sites; and (15) they believed that a key ingredient to the Weed and Seed Program's success was the commitment of the mayors' and U.S. Attorneys' offices and civic and business leaders.