The Common Council met 06/05/2024. One of the items separated out for an individual vote was the request to approve $2 million in American Recovery Plan Act grant awards to local non-profits focused on mental health, community wellness, childhood development, and family support.
The largest of these grant awards was to First 5 Fox Valley which received $750,000 which it hopes to put toward the purchase of the former Trout Museum of Art building near Houdini Plaza which it plans to turn into a family resource center.
The Council approved the grant awards by a vote of 11-2 with Alderpersons Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) and Chad Doran (District 15) voting against. Alderperson Hartzheim expressed the belief that the Council needed “to better prioritize the spending of our budget, and that includes these ARPA funds.” She stated, “[W]e have to do a better job in this room of prioritizing what’s what a city does and what a city must do first and foremost.”
Alderperson Doran agreed with Alderperson Hartzheim. While he recognized that the non-profits being awarded these taxpayer funded grants did good work, he did not think that work was the job of the government. “Let’s not forget that government created the problem that we’re in here, and now we’re trying to have government solve the problem and be the solution, and it is never both. Government is never the answer to solve problems.” He also wanted to know what would happen when the grants ran out and was concerned the organizations would just come back for more funding from the government.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
Barb Tengesdal, the executive director of First 5, Oliver Zornow, the CEO and President of the Building for Kids, and Lisa Strandberg the executive director of Pillars, spoke during the public participation portion of the meeting and thanked the Council for the grant allocations.
Ms. Tengesdal talked about the collaborative process between First 5, parents, and community partners that went into crafting the vision for a family resource center. “The primary goal of a family resource center is to strengthen families, recognizing that there’s a variety of ways to do that and each family is unique, and by working together, we can create better outcomes for children and make generational change for many—for our community.”
Mr. Zornow said the BFK for use the money to target programing at “those children who are most impacted in their development as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic. […] the COVID 19 pandemic and the economic crisis that accompanied it had a profound impact on young children and their families. You’re only two years old once. And so, when that developmental those developmental opportunities are taken from you because of a pandemic, you can’t bring those back. There is no going back. All we can do now is to use these funds as a community to make investments to try and mitigate the impact of the toxic stress, the adverse childhood experiences, the numerous barriers that have been placed in front of this next generation of leaders in our community.”
Ms. Strandberg said the funds Pillars received “recognizes that [Pillars’ staff members] deserve to be compensated fairly, that they deserve to be educated and trained adequately to do the very difficult work that they have to do.”
Alderperson Patti Heffernan (District 8) was disappointed none of the ARPA funds were being directed toward substance use disorders or health concerns, but overall she supported the grants saying, “if we aren’t prioritizing these issues in our community, what really are we doing as a city?”
Alderperson Vaya Jones (District 10) supported allocating these funds to the various organizations because she knew first hand what these organizations were doing for the Appleton community.
Alderperson Denise Fenton (District 6) said that the Treasury guidance on ARPA funds indicated they were intended to “fight the pandemic and support families and businesses struggling with its with its public health and economic impacts, maintain vital public services even amid declines in revenues resulting from the crisis, build a strong, resilient and equitable recovery by making investments that support long term growth and opportunity.” She noted that some ARPA funds had been used for library broadband and to replace lead service lines in the city. She supported the fact that “a significant portion was allocated at the time to support families in their recovery from a global pandemic.”
Alderperson Martyn Smith (District 4) supported the allocations, saying, “So much of the damage from the pandemic wasn’t physical infrastructure, but it was social infrastructure. And I think study after study shows the damage to families and to children and education, and with these federal ARPA funds, I think it’s appropriate that some portion of that, a good portion of that, be set aside for organizations like the ones that you represent.” He also added, “attending to social questions and social needs is very much part of our job and part of what we what I see us as doing here. That’s part of building a better Appleton, and I would just oppose any desire to split physical infrastructure with the social infrastructure that your organization’s represent.”
In response to the concerned Alderperson Doran raised, Alderperson Katie Van Zeeland (District 5) asked Mayor Woodford to review how the city had decided where the ARPA funds would be spent. Mayor Woodford said that the city reviewed the guidance from the Treasury Department and gathered input from the community. Based on the input they received from the community, staff created a set of recommendations to the Council.
The city received around $14.4 million in ARPA funds. The first tranche of $6.8 million in funds was used to cover immediate pandemic response expenses such as the vaccination clinic and PPE needs as well as cover lost revenue. They also allocated $2 million for library broadband and $1 million for lead service line abatement.
Regarding the second tranche, Mayor Woodford said the plan all along was “to leave time for a process to make grants, to identify critical projects that the city itself would take on in the future, understanding that the situation with the pandemic was evolving and that we wouldn’t know, we didn’t know, in 2021, exactly where we would be in 2024 as we were sort of running out of clock on the on the program. So, the Council then ratified the recommendations after reviewing it and revising it, and that’s how we ended up with the buckets that we had.”
Alderperson Van Zeeland said, “a lot of the concern that I received about these items was in thinking that this was new allocation of some point. It’s been so long since we discussed these, when I reminded everyone about the public input and the there was an online tool, they remember that, but it it’s hard for people to put this together. This sounds like new funding, because so much time has gone by.”
Alderperson Van Zeeland also confirmed with Community Development Director Kara Homan that there was no expectation that the organizations receiving ARPA funds would come back for more money to sustain their programs.
The Council proceeded to vote 11-2 to approve the ARPA grant awards.
[The whole idea that there is some sort of “social infrastructure” that a city government has a responsibility to maintain is problematic to me. As I have noted before, Chapter 62 of Wisconsin’s state statues outline the responsibilities of cities. In that chapter, the services that cities provide are Police, Fire, and Public Works (with a seeming focus on roads and utilities). Non-service activities that cities engage in are enforcing building codes and engaging in city planning.
All of those things broadly serve all of the residents of a city, and focusing on them will provide benefit to everybody in a city in a real and substantial way that giving taxpayer funded grant dollars to independent, narrowly focused organizations will not do. That doesn’t mean that those organizations aren’t doing worthwhile work, but the mere fact that they do worthwhile work does not mean they ought to be funded with taxpayer dollars.
Additionally, the idea that First 5’s family resource center somehow has something to do with recovering from that pandemic seemed a little ridiculous to me. First 5 is focused on children ages 0-5. The children most affected by the pandemic response have already, for the most part, aged out of that group, and the few that haven’t will have aged out by the time this resource center is completed.
It was well known back in 2020 for anyone who had ears to hear that responding to Covid by aggressively shutting everything down was going to have an outsized negative impact on children’s development. Engaging in paltry efforts to somehow ameliorate the effects of that bad decision-making by creating programs after the fact that don’t even target the children most effected just seems like yet more bad decision-making.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1195549&GUID=622A4F4C-DDAD-4A7E-B001-F5356C5417F7
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