MONROE — After months of discussion and information gathering, county officials are close to a decision on how to spend about $7.5 million in federal funds provided to local governments during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While they have yet to agree on a final list of all the potential projects to be funded with the extra federal money, the county’s finance committee agreed on a recommendation for the top three projects to be funded initially.
Their recommendation would still need approval of the full county board.
Those projects identified included spending nearly $400,000 to update the county’s aging IT infrastructure with software powered by Google Workspace and about $166,000 for a mobile command vehicle for the Green County sheriff’s department. The biggest expenditure tentatively agreed upon by the committee was $2.7 million to fix the aging clock tower.
A report was presented to the County Board Finance Committee last week on the spending plan and will be further debated by the county board in the weeks and even months ahead.
Helmed by county board chair Jerry Guth, the so-called ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) Committee has been meeting since late February to consider proposals from throughout the county. It is made up of a geographically diverse group of officials and citizens selected to weigh the many proposals from agencies across Green County.
They passed along a report of their work to the Finance Committee this week, but there also will be a link to the report on the county’s internet site for the public to peruse well advance of any final vote on spending the federal money.
“It’s been a long process,” said Guth, addressing the finance committee last week. “It’s not just one and done…Democracy isn’t always pleasant to watch.”
The good thing, he said, is the county doesn’t have to spend all the money immediately, which means there is time to identify other priorities.
Guth, for example, lamented the initial lack of human-interest funding in the first wave of approved projects. There are many such projects dealing with mental health, and community health for which grant money was needed and sought; and county officials are still weighing those, acknowledging how hard it is to calculate the net impact on social programs like child care against such “hard” priorities as culvert replacement or the clock tower work.
“We should definitely address mental health,” said finance committee member Dawn Sass, who represents District 30 on the county board.
Guth and other committee members agreed. In addition to Guth and Sass, finance and accounting committee members also include chair Kristi Leonard, Jody Hoesly, and Brenda Carus.
“How do you quantify the impact on a child’s life?” Guth said. “That’s one of the things we had to wrestle with as a group.”
The money can generally be earmarked for a number of projects including to replace public revenue loss, public health, premium pay for essential workers, water and sewer work; and broadband access, according to Guth.
Additional criteria for prioritizing the project applications was the potential for a given project to have a county-wide impact, with largest number of county citizens benefitting. Broadband funding was a heavy favorite during the committee meetings and surveys but officials realized that given how expensive it is built out broadband in rural areas it would be difficult to have a significant impact with only some of the about $7.5 million.
In addition to Guth and Henrickson, the Ad-hoc committee included Casey Jones, Bekah Stauffacher, Bill Oemichen, Mark Mayer, Matt Sheaffer, Megan Leonard, and Roald Henderson. Non-voting advisory members included Andrea Sweeney, representing Green County finance; Arianna Voegeli, Green County clerk and Nikki Austin, of Green County Development Corporation.
The county internet site has an entire section dedicated to the ARPA project including information on the applicants and the selection and ranking process.