Recovery Fund repurposing would leave Enfield agencies dry again
by Robert Lynch; August 5, 2024
It came from out of nowhere Monday, as Tompkins County’s behind-the-curtain legislative decisions often do. Rather than redirect as much as $1.5 Million in Community Recovery Fund moneys to other community agencies should Cayuga Medical Center fail to win state approval for a Crisis Stabilization Center by a month’s-end deadline, County Government may repurpose the federally-supported appropriation for its own purposes, like buying highway equipment.
And should legislators follow through on what Recovery Fund Advisory Committee Chair Dan Klein revealed at Monday’s meeting, the fund’s overall $6.5 Million set aside in 2021 for agency distribution would shrink to about $5 Million. The decision would strip away about one-quarter of what the Legislature had intended to use for community agencies and projects, most of which local government cannot fund itself.
The Community Recovery Fund allocates only a small slice of the nearly $20 Million Tomkins County had received from the American Rescue Plan (ARPA), an assignment intended as Washington’s reimbursement for a post-pandemic financial crisis that Tompkins County Government never really suffered. Federal rules require binding contracts to spend the ARPA money by year’s end. The deadline has prompted administrators to hustle the money through their ledgers so as not to lose it.
After a half-hour of recommending small-dollar redistributions Monday, Committee Chair Klein—who also now chairs the full Legislature—suggested the committee not meet for another three or four months, breezing past the August 30th drop-dead date it had set in late-June for Cayuga Medical to secure the required state approvals for its Crisis Stabilization project.
“I could imagine potentially needing another meeting sooner depending on how that goes, legislator Veronica Pillar, a committee member, told the chairman. Pillar recognized what nearly everyone else has also come to recognize: namely that CMC will not likely secure the Albany approvals it needs by the deadline set. Had a contingency plan been fleshed out, Pillar asked.
“The contingency plan,” Klein answered, “is that we’re going to use it (that is, the $1.5 Million) for County purposes, probably highway equipment or something expensive and easily justified with ARPA money.”
“However, if anybody has a different idea, we can revisit that question, but that’s where we landed on that one,” Klein said.
Dan Klein may have landed there, but neither the Advisory Committee nor the full County Legislature has done so. Any repurposing of any CMC forfeiture for County’s needs received no more than glancing attention at the committee’s June 24th meeting. And nowhere in that meeting’s official minutes is a County clawback referenced. Rather, the trucks-and-bulldozers option sounds more like something cooked up in private legislator conversations since then.
The Klein revelation, as usual, spells more bad news for Enfield. Effectively frozen out of the biggest distribution of the Recovery Fund’s seven-figure total in 2022, Enfield as a community received only $26,592 from it, all of it to purchase Town Highway Department radios. The committee and the Legislature snubbed far-larger requests by the Enfield Community Council (ECC), the Enfield Food Pantry and the Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC).
As has occurred so often, one of those three organizations, the Fire Company, stood kissing close to funding Monday, yet again fell short of the cut. The EVFC was among a select group of runners-up which could have snatched some of the $27,611 in left-overs the committee sought to distribute that day. But because of a complicated scoring procedure that involves as many as 14 legislators, other agencies were recommended for the small-dollar gifting. Enfield’s firefighters were not.
“I think that it is important that the one-and-a-half million go toward something that could have been funded through the Community Recovery Fund,” legislator Pillar told the committee.
“I think it would be uncool… to put it back into the General Fund,” Pillar said, “because then what it looks like to the broader community is: Here’s a bunch of money that you could use to rebuild, support a community organization. We’re taking about a quarter of it and allocating it to one of the biggest organizations locally (CMC). Oops. There were problems… So we’re just going to take it back for the County and that’s the end of that. That is not great.”
“I agree with everything Veronica said,” Newfield-Enfield legislator Randy Brown chimed in on Zoom.
Pillar used the closing moments of the Recovery Fund committee’s brief meeting to urge the committee to “set aside the same amount” of CMC’s expected forfeiture for “Community Recovery-like purposes.”
Dan Klein lent Pillar a sympathetic ear, but made no promises. “Save that for the full Legislature,” Klein told Pillar. “Our intent would be to use (the available money) for things that we’re already spending money on anyway, and we will have to explain that to the public over and over again.”
But explaining why money first set aside for human needs now finds its place buying a CAT excavator may not prove an easy sell.
Cayuga Health, CMC’s parent organization, has found it particularly hard dislodging Albany’s reticence to authorizing the Crisis Stabilization Center. As described by the hospital corporation, the center would “provide 24/7 mental health and substance use crisis support and safe, effective, evidence-based care in a non-restrictive environment.” It would be quartered in CMC’s set-aside space in the Shops at Ithaca Mall.
Cayuga Health officials have been circumspect about why state regulators’ won’t budge. But last September, CMC’s Martin Stallone told County officials that what New York State would apparently prefer is some sort of “psychiatric emergency room,” a much different facility.
Chairman Klein revealed during Monday’s meeting that County and CMC officials will meet August 15th at which time they could reach the make-or-break decision about the Stabilization Center’s funding status.
Some in Tompkins County Government would like to see the Stabilization Center funded, even if the ARPA deadline cannot be met. Legislator Deborah Dawson suggested to the committee that Tompkins County might park the ARPA cash in the Highway account, and then draw upon its first-intended Highway appropriation to underwrite the Stabilization Center.
But state law limits how governments can gift public moneys to private institutions. A deputy County Administrator cautioned as much Monday. Nonetheless, some believe CMC’s quasi-public status provides them a work-around.
There’s also a desire by some like legislator Pillar to retain the money Cayuga Health may not find able to tap for a continued mental health purpose. As such, should Klein and others relax their present plans, the Enfield Community Council could be advantageously positioned.
ECC most recently requested a minimum $146,000 from the Recovery Fund to construct a mental health wing onto its Enfield Community Center. Its purpose would hold a common thread to CMC’s, and ECC President Cortney Bailey has pledged it would be shovel-ready to meet ARPA’s tight timetable.
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