A Jackson County Bailout

In a season whose origin is credited to Divine intervention some 2,000 years ago, it appears that only a modern miracle will help Jackson County meet a looming Dec. 31 deadline. That’s the date by which it must commit to a spending plan for $70 million tossed into the wind by Washington during the first year of the pandemic.

Things reached the zenith of elected-body dysfunction in November when five of the nine members of the Jackson County Legislature declined to show up for a meeting, denying the group a quorum on which to act. 

At issue: About half of the $136.5 million that Congress authorized for the county under the American Recovery Plan Act in 2021. Some $70 million remains to be allocated, raising the question of what, precisely, is the plight from which Jackson County must “recover.”

Initially, the county drafted a 2 page vision for divvying up its windfall:

• $28.5 million for ongoing public health response and recovery needs.

• $88 million for revenue replacement, whatever that means. (This, while the county was reaping the benefits of 2020’s monster increases in property valuations from a bungled reappraisal effort.) 

• $20 million to mitigate negative economic impacts caused by the public health emergency. Raise your hand if you’re a small business whose company was spared insolvency from that slush fund.

The county restated those same vague priorities, albeit fleshed out with some details, in its nine-page 2022 plan update. By 2023, some clarity emerged, though the share dedicated to public health response had gone from its original $28.5 to $51.4 million. Puzzling in itself, is the percentage of people with up-to-date vaccinations in the county fell from less than 66 percent at the end of 2021 to just under 15.9 percent as of June 2024. If it was going for public health, it sure wasn’t funding vaccinations.

Meanwhile, “revenue replacement” now isn’t nearly as critical a community need as first projected, dropping nearly $55 million from the original plan to $33.7 million. And that $20 million to “mitigate negative impacts” of the so-called emergency? That had been bumped to $51.4 million. 

So here we are, three years later, and legislators are squabbling about how to use the remaining $70 million—fix up what County Executive Frank White calls distressed public buildings? Or make sure more of what’s left goes into the rabbit hole of reducing inequity and rescuing “underserved populations”?

Which sort of begs the question: If inequity could have been reduced in 2021, why didn’t the county act then? And if salving the wounds of being underserved was a crying social need in 2021, why wasn’t it addressed then? Or in 2022? Or 2023? If the need since 2021 hasn’t risen to a level that would compel the county to act, how is it being measured today to verify that spending $70 million would do any good?

Interestingly enough, folks across the state line in Johnson County didn’t seem to have any trouble figuring out where to spend their $117 million allocation. A quick (!) read through the county’s 170-page (!!) Recovery Plan Performance Report suggests that elected and administrative officials there at least had a strategy for seeking community consensus and a mechanism for achieving their goals.

Oddly again, Clay County seems to have little standing in the way of a plan to disperse $48.55 million. Platte County pulled it off with its $20 million allotment. Guess it’s easier to cobble together a short-order strategy when the amounts are smaller. 

Of course, there’s plenty to nitpick in each county’s spending, whether it’s “administrative expenses”—aren’t county employees already being paid to do this kind of thing?—to the processes of selecting non-profits and civic organizations for things like work-force training for under-employed artists (yeah, that’s a thing).

So maybe the folks at the Jackson County Courthouse need juuuuust a little more input on how to handle this scalding hot potato. Here’s some: Give the damn money back. 

Clearly, the need must be miniscule to leave that cash collecting interest for two years. As an added bonus, you might make a few headlines around the country; if you haven’t noticed, the nation is now $34 trillion in the hole. 

No, $70 million won’t go very far in fixing that. But what if the 3,243 other counties in the nation had admitted that ARPA was a self-indulgent act of congressional virtue signaling and one that, in the end, did next to nothing to stop the pandemic spread (a purported main priority) and provided little empirical evidence of small businesses’ being saved (another spending pillar)?

Failing that type of clear thinking, of course, Jackson County could just Zelle me the troublesome funds before the Dec. 31 deadline hits. I have a spending plan ready to go. Frank White can give me a call to get my transfer details. After that, beers are on me at Governor Stumpy’s.