By SARA CLIFFORD and SUZANNAH COUCH | The Democrat
The next round of COVID-19 relief funding — this time, from the American Rescue Plan — is expected to arrive in Brown County next month, with another installment expected next year.
County leaders, town leaders and Brown County Schools leaders are still learning about and discussing how they might spend it. They have until the end of 2024 to do that.
Nearly $3 million in relief funding is coming to Brown County, $230,000 is coming to the Nashville Town Council and a planned $2.5 million is coming to Brown County Schools from the American Rescue Plan.
Attorney Dustin Meeks with Barnes and Thornburg talked to the Brown County Council about options at their April 19 meeting. The amount the county is getting through the ARP is almost six times more than the $494,248 the county received in CARES Act funding.
He said they were still waiting on guidance from the United States Department of Treasury on how the money can be spent.
Local governments can use the money for a number of expenses, including revenue shortfalls; responding to negative impacts on housing, nonprofits and small businesses due to the pandemic; paying salaries of essential workers; or paying for necessary investments in water, sewer or broadband infrastructure.
Though the bill outlines some parameters for how local governments can spend relief money, there is still a gray area, particularly with regard to using money for infrastructure improvements.
If the money is not used correctly, counties will have to repay it, council member Judy Swift-Powdrill reported. She had volunteered to spend time looking into the funding and the requirements for it.
Counties also will be required to provide periodic spending reports. The council and Brown County Commissioners will have to develop a plan for how they want to spend it.
“We definitely need to have a plan and we need to cooperate and work with other leadership in county government,” council President Dave Redding said. He said that sessions were being scheduled to do just that.
County resident Kevin Fleming said this money will have to be held in a separate fund and will be spent like a grant from that fund. He used to work for the Department of Local Government Finance.
The first round of payment is expected to the county, town and school corporation by May 11. It will be half the total, Meeks said. The other half will come next year.
County’s talks
One possible use for part of the county’s ARP money will be to cover part of the local match for the Helmsburg stormwater project. The county received a grant of $600,000 for that project, but a local match of $250,000 is also required.
In a special session on April 12, the county council approved a resolution authorizing the temporary transfer of $250,000 from the unappropriated part of the motor vehicle highway fund to the stormwater grant fund.
“I don’t expect to borrow this, but I need to have it available on paper so OCRA can check off their boxes and give us our funding,” commissioner Diana Biddle said.
The initial plan was for the county to get $250,000 from the State Revolving Loan Fund’s specialized loan program for stormwater projects, but the required paperwork would have delayed the release of the funds, so that application wasn’t completed.
The plan was to repay that through the county’s economic development fund over the next three years, Biddle told the council.
Biddle said after finding out about ARP money coming to the county, it would make more sense for the county to use that money instead of borrowing from the State Revolving Loan Fund and having to pay interest.
Matching funds had to be in place by April 20 so that OCRA would release money and a bid could be awarded. The project needs to be done before cold weather hits. But at the April 21 commissioners meeting, Donna Anderson with grant administrator Kenna Consulting said that they were waiting on a letter from the county auditor to get the release of funds, so the bid award was delayed until the next commissioners meeting on May 5.
Biddle said that the Helmsburg stormwater project meets the definition — so far — of eligible expenses for ARP funding.
The resolution the council approved on April 12 states that the money from the MVH fund is necessary for “cash flow purposes” until funding from the ARP is available. It also states the money is coming from a surplus in the account and that it will need to be returned to the MVH fund by the end of this year.
If the ARP money cannot be used for the stormwater project, Biddle said the county would pull from the redevelopment commission, which has already put up $156,000 to help cover the required local match. The RDC still has money in an account from the sale of the For Bare Feet sock factory property.
The county may also be in a position where they have to return some of the stormwater grant funding, since the apparent low bidder came in well below what the engineers had projected the price would be. If that happens, then the county would not need as much local match money.
Council President Dave Redding asked Biddle if the $250,000 in MVH would be needed for road projects this year. Biddle said she was not sure and that the highway department still had leftover Community Crossings-funded road projects that have to be finished.
“I don’t expect to use that this year,” she said about the $250,000 in the road fund.
Schools’ talks
Brown County Schools is also receiving more COVID relief. The planned allocation is $2,562,957.25 from the American Rescue Plan, but that amount has not been finalized.
The school district has already received two rounds of funding, not counting this one. The first round through the CARES Act brought in $295,597.13 and a second round resulted in an additional $1,141,192.95.
All three rounds of funding through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund equal nearly $4 million for Brown County Schools.
On Thursday, May 6, Superintendent Laura Hammack will update the school board on how much money the district has received and how the first round of funding was spent, along with plans for the next two rounds.
The third round of ESSER funding can reimburse approved expenses incurred through September 2024 “that address some of the greatest challenges schools continue to face as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to a press release from the Indiana Department of Education.
Schools must use at least 20 percent of that funding to “support accelerated learning opportunities for students, as schools work to make up for lost instructional time due to COVID-19,” according to federal requirements, the IDOE states. Summer school, after-school programs and extended school year programs are some of the uses that could be funded.
Town’s talks
Nashville’s Strategic Direction Adviser, Dax Norton, is working on ideas to possibly leverage the town’s $230,000 from the ARP to get more funding for projects.
In looking into possible uses for the money, it was discovered that Brown County and Nashville — like most central Indiana counties — are not part of Economic Development District (EDD) through the U.S. Department of Commerce. EDDs are communities that work together on a regional economic development plan.
The town’s grant administrator, ARa, approached the town about fixing that. If Nashville and Brown County are able to join with other area Indiana counties, we could be connected to a larger pool of federal funding, Norton explained. He has talking with Monroe, Bartholomew and Jackson counties about forming an EDD with Brown County and “everyone tentatively agreed to move forward,” Norton told the town council.
Grants available to EDDs are significant and averaged about $7 million when the CARES Act money went out, he said. With the ARP money, grants could be even higher. But until Brown County is in an EDD, we are not eligible for those awards.
For now, the Nashville Town Council has adopted an ordinance establishing a fund for its $230,000 in ARP money and committing to using it only for four possible reasons, unless other guidance is received from the federal government:
to respond to COVID or its negative economic impacts, including assistance to households, small businesses, nonprofits, or aid to impacted industries such as tourism, travel and hospitality;
to respond to workers performing essential work by providing premium pay to those eligible town workers or providing grants to other eligible employers;
to provide government services that were affected by a reduction in revenue due to the pandemic; or
to make necessary improvements in water, sewer or broadband infrastructure.
“At the moment, transportation projects look to be a restricted use of the funds unless a community can provide very specific documentation that they had to put off a 2020 project due to a decrease in revenue because of COVID,” Norton told the council.
In the Nashville Utility Service Board meeting on April 14, Norton mentioned possibly being able to act on some of the utility plans the town has been developing with this new money, especially if the EDD can be set up. However, no votes have been taken on spending any of it yet. The council will be required to form a spending plan.
