The Finance Committee met 05/20/2024. One of the items they took up was the request to approve ARPA non-profit grant awards of $500,000 for “Mental Health, Community Wellness, and Violence Prevention” services and $1.5 million for “Early Childhood Development, Childcare, and Family Support” services.
The organizations that received grants included NEW Mental Health Connection, World Relief, Boys and Girls Club, Pillars, Inc, Valley Packaging Industries, Us 2 Behavioral Health Care, YMCA of the Fox Cities, Building for Kinds, and First 5 Fox Valley.
The grant awards were recommended for approval by a vote of 4-1 with Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) casting the dissenting vote.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
These grant awards were taking up during the same meeting that the proposed increase to the wheel tax was taken up. Alderperson Hartzheim opposed the grant awards, not because she believed the individual organizations were unworthy, but because she believed the ARPA dollars had been intended by the federal government primarily for infrastructure needs and that the city should be focusing on its core responsibilities. She felt conflicted about approving ARPA funds for individual organizations and then turning around a raising the wheel tax rate on city residents.
Alderperson Denise Fenton (District 6) pointed to how bad things were four years ago. “Schools were closed. We didn’t know. We lived in fear. We didn’t know whether it was safe to eat the food that some brave people delivered to us from the grocery store. Children weren’t in school. Babies weren’t getting well care. There were no library programs for childhood enrichment. Mental health […] professionals weren’t seeing patients.”
Although the American Recovery Plan Act did talk about infrastructure she chose to focus on the “rescue” part of the act. “I focused on the rescue, the funds to help the people who had been impacted by a worldwide pandemic. And particularly for this area, mental health and children were what was being impacted, and honestly, I wish we had all the money to do all the things. But the children, the young people, they’re going to be around after everything that sits, you know—everything has crumbled. And if we don’t take care of those things, now, it doesn’t really matter what we do.”
Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland (District 5) felt that families and children could be described as infrastructure. “For those who don’t work with children regularly, it’s really hard to explain how much children lose when they lose learning in the early years of their life. I have a child with a developmental disability. I understand how important early intervention can be, and how the lack of that intervention can affect a child for the rest of their life. The families and children of this city are infrastructure. They’re what keep this city going. They’re what will have these kids working here and wanting to live here in the future. One of the fundamental errors, of having non-parents making decisions for many, many years has been the lack of understanding that and the lack of taking that into account. I think most people now are starting to understand that we need people to buy houses here. We need people to be invested. And sometimes that means investing in them.”
Alderperson Chris Croatt (District 14) thought Alderperson Hartzheim made some good points, and he wished that they could use the funding for important infrastructure projects, but it had been decided years ago the direction the Council wanted to go with allocating ARPA funds, so he supported the grant awards.
The committee voted 4-1 to recommend the grants be awarded.
[It is incredibly vexing to hear people bewail the consequences of society having gone mad when Covid hit as if those consequences hadn’t been foreseen at the time. Government officials were warned about the consequences of shutting down schools and shutting down business and shutting down society. They didn’t have to shut things down. The city government didn’t need to meet over Zoom. Mental health providers could have been meeting with people the entire time. It was never dangerous to eat food during Covid. And now for some reason they think giving multi-thousand dollar grants to mental health providers, the Boys and Girls Club, and the Building for Kids is going to make things better, which seems unlikely to me.
Additionally, as wonderful and important as people are, they are not infrastructure. Infrastructure is things like roads, sewers, and water lines, things that cities are supposed to maintain. The core responsibilities of cities are laid out in Chapter 62 of Wisconsin’s State Statutes, and they don’t include giving money to a handful of select businesses that cater to children and people struggling with mental health problems.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1189394&GUID=02DF36EF-8711-45CF-8D94-A112FB9D1832
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