As deadline nears, more time urged
State leaders, advocates fear some money will go unused by counties
MALTA – Greg Hill is a hands-on mayor. In the village of Malta, across the Muskingum River from Mcconnelsville, about 80 miles southeast of Columbus in Morgan County, Hill’s mission is to make his hometown just a little bit better than it was the day before.
Ever since the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, he has been determined to provide for the public and make sure the village stays safe.
His latest challenge? Find ways to properly spend all $106,329.81 of the CARES Act money allocated to Malta by Ohio’s Office of Budget and Management before the federally mandated Dec. 30 deadline.
“We’re used to doing without,” Hill said.
“It’s tough because when we get audited it’s difficult to keep track. We just want to make sure we’re following the rules.”
On March 25, President Donald Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act into law after it passed through Congress. The state of Ohio received $1.2 billion in local funding from the CARES Act to distribute to individual townships and municipalities within all 88 counties. And the Ohio legislature has allocated those funds in three phases: June, August and October, OBM Director Kimberly Murnieks explained.
“Ohio’s one of the states that elected to fully share the local portion with our local governments,” Murnieks said. “Gov. Dewine and the General Assembly felt it was imperative that local dollars go to their local communities.”
The state wanted to provide villages such as Malta the autonomy and opportunity to accept the money allocated to them and spend it in their communities as they saw fit, the director added.
The deadline for a municipality to determine how the last round of CARES Act installments, a $650 million investment, will be spent is Nov. 20. If they choose not to accept the funds or there is money left over, then those funds will be reallocated by the local county Nov. 20-25 and then redistributed by that county in late November, Murnieks said.
All CARES Act funding must be spent by Dec. 30 or it will be returned to the federal government. The deadline for spending was set by Congress in the spring, which many advocates and local officials now say is unrealistic.
“The deadline was imposed on this pandemic and that isn’t going away,” Misty Crosby said. “That’s ridiculous.”
Crosby, director of the Buckeye Hills Regional Council – a southeastern Ohio coalition of local governments that serve eight Appalachian counties – said she sees three overarching issues with the CARES Act
funding: a short-fuse timeline, large amounts of money and understaffed local governments.
Many of the communities that Crosby and her team assist have never received federal funding before the coronavirus pandemic, so the historically large figures they’ve received in just eight months’ time has been overwhelming for even the region’s most well-equipped municipalities, she said.
For instance, Washington County, a Buckeye Hills county along the Ohio River, received about $1 million in the first two CARES Act distributions, Crosby said. But in October, the county received an additional $2 million that must be encumbered in less than two months.
Crosby said Buckeye Hills’ eightcounty region stands to lose out on $6 million if the deadline is not extended, based on OBM’S resolution tracker. And that doesn’t even take into account the municipalities’ inability to spend the money.
It demonstrates a huge lack of capacity in Ohio’s rural regions, Crosby said. Many of the area’s local elected officials have day jobs on top of their government positions, so there isn’t always the time to decode the semantics of federal funding.
Some municipalities have experienced a relatively low number of COVID-19 cases, though officials are worried about what the winter might bring. They want to be prepared for any possible spikes in cases, but they also don’t want to misappropriate any spending and risk getting hit in future state audits. It’s a perfect storm of lack of capacity, increased dollars and heightened scrutiny, Crosby said.
Murnieks has been talking with Ohio’s congressional representatives and Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, urging them all to push back the deadlines, let the municipalities be more flexible with spending the dollars and consider increasing spending for future impact.
As a Washington County native, Murnieks said she’s taking it personally to ensure there is as much guidance and time to use these dollars as possible.
“It has not been extended yet, but we’re hopeful that might happen,” she
said. “It is absolutely our focus that none of these dollars are returned to Washington, D.C.”
But Morgan County Commission President Adam Shriver is frustrated.
“I don’t feel like there was a lot of guidance or a cohesive message from the state of Ohio on what the expectations were, how much money you were going to get and how you could use it,” he said. “We are operating under the assumption that these deadlines will not be extended and I don’t know this to be true.”
Shriver explained that throughout each phase of funding, the state would set aside a county line item and individual line items for each township and municipality in the county. In Morgan County, he said, only the village of Malta and the county seat, Mcconnelsville, have taken on the arduous task of accepting their funds and appropriately spending all the dollars.
“Township trustees are worried about roadways,” Shriver said. “With the restrictions that came attached to this funding, I think they were just hesitant to access and accidentally misspend these funds.”
In Ohio, township trustees are elected officials whose primary task is to maintain township roads and cemeteries. Federal funding is not typically part of the picture.
PJ Hinkle, president of the Morgan County Township Association, explained that most townships do not
have the manpower or the infrastructure to determine who should or shouldn’t get funding.
“We don’t have training in that,” he said. “We don’t even know how to set up for that, so then you feel like you can get caught up in a lot of red tape.”
Hinkle is also one of three trustees in Deerfield Township who believes that the funding comes with too many Covid-19-specific spending limitations for a county that has not experienced a significant outbreak. He’s also worried about the lack of direction from the state.
“Personally I think it’s so vague that I don’t want to,” he said. “I don’t want to take our township down a road by misappropriating funds, but ultimately we want to do the best for our people and our townships. ... You have to operate with a little bit of reservation there because this is the public’s money.”
In Malta, Mayor Hill pored over the state’s webinars and read through emails and pamphlets. They purchased a new temperature scanner, masks, updated their heating/cooling systems with UV lighting, upgraded to touchless plumbing in town hall and bought 11 new laptops for city employees.
But they still had money left over. So Hill opted to share at least $40,000 so far, with social services organizations such as Washington-morgan Community Action or the local food pantry, in order for Malta to spend the money from all three phases before the federal deadline is up.
Sharing CARES Act funding to community organizations is allowed per guidance from Congress and the state. It’s one way to make sure these dollars are spent in the community and used by people who may have more experience with handling federal grants.
Kelly Hatas, executive director of Hocking Athens Perry Community Action, said the organization has entered into a handful of sub-grant agreements with local jurisdictions to provide emergency services to people affected by COVID-19 in its service area.
“Though these funds are set to expire on Dec. 30, the pandemic is not, and our local communities are going to continue to feel this well into 2021, if not beyond,” Hatas said.
The uncertainty concerns county commissioners including Shriver, who understands the state is doing its best, but knows this economic crisis is far from over.
“I find (the deadlines) kind of disappointing, because it puts communities in a position where they need to hurry up and spend the money, which is clearly not the best position,” Shriver said. “But the federal government gave them this money and said figure it out. It’s not super easy and everybody has to put their heads around it.” shendrix@dispatch.com @sheridan120 cdoyle@dispatch.com @cadoyle_18