We shared, yesterday in Part One, some of the issues discussed at the Tuesday, August 18 meeting between the San Juan Basin Public Health District board and staff and the county commissioners from La Plata and Archuleta Counties, the two counties served by the district. One of the graphs shared by SJBPH Executive Director Liane Jollon showed the budget adjustments the health district has made this year, to fund the testing, monitoring and tracking of COVID-19 cases in the two counties they serve.
Clearly, it has cost some money to address the public health emergency. The health district had planned, last December, to spend about $6.1 million this year — before COVID arrived — but now expects to spend only $4.7 million on non-COVID services, and about $2.8 million on “Reallocated” and “COVID Reimbursable” projects.
Over $2 trillion in federal funds — allocated for addressing the COVID pandemic — have been subject to political squabbles ever since the CARES Act was signed into law on March 27. The Act provided funding directly to counties with populations of over 500,000 people, which meant that only five Colorado counties received direct disbursements. The State of Colorado also received a direct disbursement, and funneled some money into the Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) to then be distributed to smaller counties. The funds can be used only for actions taken to respond to the pandemic, such as addressing medical or public health needs, as well as expenditures incurred to respond to second-order effects of the emergency, such as economic support to those suffering from employment or business interruptions due to COVID-19-related business closures.
The funds “may not be used to fill shortfalls in government revenue to cover expenditures that would not otherwise qualify under the statute. Although a broad range of uses is allowed, revenue replacement is not a permissible use of Fund payments.” Money was not distributed directly to public health districts, so SJBPH is dependent upon its two county sponsors to pass along any available CARES funding.
We listened on Tuesday as Ms. Jollon explained the request. Would the Archuleta County commissioners pledge $150,000 of their $600,000 DOLA disbursement… which would then be matched by an equal $150,000 grant, thus generating $300,000 in revenues that could be used for COVID testing, tracking, monitoring, and education… a step towards balancing the $600,000 in funds already pledged by the La Plata County BOCC to SJBPH?
Archuleta’s three Republican commissioners — Ronnie Maez, Alvin Schaaf and Steve Wadley — attended Tuesday’s SJBPH work session to hear the request and to ask questions, but had not ‘noticed’ the Zoom event as an official BOCC meeting, so we understood that any official funding decision would come later, at a future BOCC meeting.
Perhaps soon?
Commissioner Maez appeared to be (hesitantly) willing to consider a $150,000 contribution. Commissioner Schaaf offered no comment on the request.
I shared some comments by Commissioner Wadley in yesterday’s installment, and today I’d like to comment on his comments. He stated, in part:
“…So while sales tax isn’t taking the beating we thought it would, because of [sales taxes collected from online purchases], we are losing money. We’re spending a lot of money this year on capital expenses, and the fact of the matter is, we’ve always just been a poor county. We’ve always just paved our road with food stamps. So I don’t know what else we can do…
“If there is money left over from the CARES Act, and if you guys can meet the reporting requirements in order for us to use that money — and they are stringent — I wouldn’t have an objection to it. If the money is left over…”
We’ve heard Commissioner Wadley complain about Archuleta County being “just a poor county” for the past eleven years, but that has not stopped our three commissioners from burning through millions of dollars in fund reserves over the past couple of years, during a period of remarkable economic growth in the US. According to the 2020 County budget document, we (the taxpayers) had well over $12 million in strategic and other County reserves (“savings”) back in 2017… and only $5.6 million in taxpayer debt.
It appears that, even before the arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the BOCC was expecting to drain our reserves down to less than $9 million by next year, and has increased our County debt burden to $27.2 million. We will be paying out $1.4 million in debt payments this year alone.
The two capital projects our current commissioners are building — an oversized jail, and a residential home being remodeled into a Sheriff’s Office — had cost overruns totaling more than $900,000 this year.
But never mind how our current commissioners may be handling our money… I want to lodge an objection to Commissioner Wadley’s complaint.
We are not “just a poor county” that should be fixing our roads with food stamps. According to US Census data (as summarized on this Wikipedia web page) Colorado ranks fifth among US states in terms of per capita income. In other words, we’re not a “poor state.”
Picking out a few relative examples from that list, we find the following approximate “Median Household Incomes” listed:
Pitkin County: $64,502
Routt County: $60,876
State of Colorado: $56,456
Archuleta County: $56,068
United States: $51,914
Denver: $45,501
Montezuma County: $44,103
La Plata County: $41,103
Alamosa County: $35,935
Granted, these are ‘dated’ government figures, shared second-hand on a public website. They’re not completely accurate. But they seem to indicate that Archuleta County is in fact one of the wealthier communities in Colorado… and in the United States.
Can we afford to share $150,000 with our own public health district?