Despite what may be reported elsewhere, the City of Greensboro has allocated all of the $59.4 million it received in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds.
The Greensboro City Council voted to dump all the ARP funds into the city’s general fund to cover loss of revenue and additional expenses the city had due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
At the Tuesday, Sept. 20 meeting, the City Council voted to allocate $2.3 million “for community project requests.” According to the agenda, this is money “made available by the American Rescue Plan.”
But technically it is not ARP money because all the ARP money has been allocated.
The City Council voted to place all the ARP funds in the general fund and then allocate the same amount of money from the general fund for projects that it considers funded by ARP.
One result of this accounting method is that the city is no longer required to meet the federal guidelines for spending ARP funds, since the ARP funds have already been allocated. It allows the City Council to designate funding for a project that does not meet the federal guidelines as an ARP project, because the funding is actually coming from the city’s general fund and not from the ARP funds, which have federal guidelines on how the money can be spent.
The projects that the City Council voted to fund with “funds made available by the American Rescue Plan,” include:
$56,0000 for Sanctuary House
$460,000 for Reading Connections
$1 million for the YMCA of Greensboro
$50,000 for the Black Suit Initiative
$53,000 for Level Up Parenting
$138,000 for Guilford Child Development
$50,000 for I am a Queen
$150,000 for Launch Greensboro
$165,000 for Gerard’s Green Garden
$25,000 for Glenwood Together
The City Council also approved allocating $6.4 million of the $8 million in ARP funds allocated for the Vance Chavis Nocho Community facility for the completion of the design development and construction documents.
Like Sailors on leave. Spend it all, even on frivolous City Council favorites.
I know, we’ll sell some more bonds for more projects now!
Can I get some cash to help my Brown Garden? Maybe more to hire some homeless to cultivate it.
Lol….all funny money for council members pet projects
Can we say underhanded and deceitful. That’s what it sounds like to me. Let’s fund our little projects we have in our back pocket why don’t we. Where there’s a will there’s a way. That’s the demaRats for ya.
So our City Council is trying to be slick and allocate to the general fund. If this switcharoo isn’t approved by the feds the city may need to pay this money back. There is an audit requirement attached to the funds to prove the money awarded is done so within the federal ARP guidelines. Plus, they are to track the project they have awarded to and report on the result of the investment. Every award is to be tracked this way and reported on for the next two years. The Feds way of saying. “This is to build a better America” infrastructure. Housing. And just a few other needs. Don’t waste the money. Obviously. the council got in the way when applications were reviewed and only the applications that fulfilled the federal requirements could be considered. Governments were given guidelines for the awards and audit requirements, the city council wanted control and the job was too big for them to handle, so came up with slight of hand to be ale to “give” the money to their special interest. I hope the audit catches them in this trickery and show them to follow the rules and not try so hard to get around them. This tactic seems to be common. If they don’t ike the rules they get
their legal partner in crime to help find a loophole. Pretty sickening if you ask me. Let’s check in two years to see what good our $59,400,000.00 did and remember this when we can vote honest people into our city council.
Another situation of an untrained city council trying to control a city employee responsibility and screwing it up. Employees go through training for these unique “bail out” or “emergency ” findings. They learn what they can and cannot do. I imagine council is breifed at the most, and do as they feel is best. Just leave the responsibility in the capable hands of the employees, you will take the praise later anyway.
Let’s see 50 k for black suits and 50 k for queens this is in addition to the same amount the county gave these same two black organizations 200k of taxpayer dollars with no way to measure any success this insanity of pi$$ing away money with inflation at a record high. 200k would be a good start to build a nice place for our homeless population will someone please send this to skip and nancy when get get back from seeing ole slo joe.