[HN Gopher] Chicago Suburb Spent Entire Federal Covid-19 Relief ...
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Chicago Suburb Spent Entire Federal Covid-19 Relief Funding on
Police Payroll
Author : morisy
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-07-01 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ciceroindependiente.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ciceroindependiente.com)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Which is what tends to happen with federal money that isn't
| carefully allocated to it's specific goal.
| sparky_z wrote:
| But money is fungible, right? This article didn't answer my
| primary questions:
|
| -Was more money spent on police salaries than would have been if
| the Covid funding hadn't come through?
|
| -What happened to the money that would have been spent on police
| salaries. What was it used for instead?
|
| -Was the amount of money the city spent on its vaccination
| program smaller than the $1 million it received from the fund?
|
| The town spokesman says "the money was also used to fund the
| entire operation of the town's vaccination programs and is
| currently still funding it."
|
| But the documents obtained by the reporter say that "Cicero used
| the CARES Act relief fund exclusively to pay officers' wages". It
| was $1,074,912, which is about 6% of the $17 million yearly
| operating payroll costs for Cicero police officers. So less than
| a month's worth.
|
| The article goes on to say "And the town's vaccination efforts
| did not start until January 2021--one month after the money was
| supposed to have been spent, according to the funding
| application." To my recollection, no vaccinations were being
| offered to the general public before 2021, so what use would a
| "vaccination program" be until the vaccines were available? Maybe
| some planning and logistical prep, but no point renting event
| space and paying nurses and volunteers to stand around all day
| until the vaccines are ready to go.
|
| Also, "Under Treasury Department guidelines, police payroll is an
| eligible expense for CARES relief as long as officers' 'services
| are substantially dedicated to mitigating or responding to the
| COVID-19 public health emergency.'"
|
| I had to jump all over the article to collect these facts in one
| place and get an overall picture of what happened, insofar as we
| know.
|
| Obviously, I don't know the truth, and I'm not in a position to
| investigate the answers to my original questions above. I'm also
| not familiar with the mechanics of how money is actually moved
| around within municipal budgets, beyond some broad
| generalizations. But one scenario that fits all the facts without
| anybody lying goes like this:
|
| -The city receives Covid relief funds that must be spent by Dec
| 2020.
|
| -By that time, no vaccine is yet available, but the money is "in
| the bank" and is "constrained": it must be spent on qualifying
| expenses.
|
| -Police officer payroll is a qualifying expense that can easily
| use up the entire relief fund of "constrained" funds.
|
| -The relief money is spent on officer's salaries and the money
| that would have been used for that purpose is held in reserve
| until vaccines are available.
|
| -That pool of reserved money is used to fund the vaccination
| effort in Cicero.
|
| Now consider an alternative scenario, in which the officer's
| salaries were paid out of the normal budget and the relief money
| was held in reserve until the vaccination campaign began in
| earnest. Nobody would bat an eye at that, even though there's
| absolutely no functional difference between those two scenarios.
| And it sounds like they weren't allowed to hold the relief money
| itself in reserve because it had to be spent by December? Not
| clear what would happen to the money if they hadn't spent it yet.
|
| Again, I have no idea if this is an accurate description of what
| happened. But it fits the facts presented and sounds plausible
| enough to me. And crucially, I have zero confidence that a
| newspaper reporter wouldn't milk an "incriminating" document like
| this for all it's worth. It is exhausting having to dig into
| every scandalous headline and see the reasonable explanations
| buried deep within the article, but that happens so frequently
| that I have no benefits of the doubt left to give.
|
| The fact that, as far as I can tell, the crucial questions
| haven't been answered at least makes me suspect that there's
| nothing seriously nefarious going on here. After all, it's not
| like Cicero spent all the relief money on police bonuses and then
| just didn't have a vaccination campaign, right? They spent the
| money on "regular salary" for police officers, and then did
| ultimately spend the money on a vaccination effort.
|
| Anybody with more expertise on municipal budgets and Covid relief
| want to chime in? Have I got this horribly wrong?
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(page generated 2021-07-01 23:02 UTC)