ARPA FUNDS

UPDATE 1/2023:  I included the note on the original social media posts. It took until December for me to get assistance.  They did, however, contract someone new, and that agency lost a bunch of records and was really badly organized. They weren't even located here in the city, are just an awful company, frankly predatory, and the money should have stayed here among city residents.  They could have hired me and other people that live her!  I mean to find the letters I sent about that and post them here, too.  

PEEPS- on this one, feel free to call Mayor and suggest I be contracted to assist this project, as well as to ask these questions yourself. ARPA funds are government money, which means taxpayer money, and you have the right to accountability and transparency.

21 March 2021

Dear Mayor Jones:

I still haven’t heard anything from your office regarding the ARPA funds and the distribution of the $500 checks. (Letters dated March 9 and March 11, 2022.) I am not asking for much: what are the criteria for receiving the money, and when can we expect to receive it?

United Way employs 153 people. I don’t know if all those people work full-time, or what their positions are. 10,000 people applied for assistance between December 18-21. There have been roughly 50-60 working days to process those applications. That’s 166 applications processed per day for all of them to be done by today.

That’s a lot for 153 employees that already have other programs and assistance to administer, year-round, post-pandemic or otherwise.

There were supposed to be 10,000 checks, and now there are only 9,300. (Why?) That means that even if every applicant were eligible, 700 must be eliminated. There doesn’t seem to be any clear criteria for award. The income levels for eligibility were $29K per year for an individual. That’s $9K more than the $10 an hour minimum wage, full time. Median income in the city for an individual is $28k. (However, north of Delmar the median income is $18k per year.)

It would be helpful to everyone that applied, to know what the other determinants are. (Even with all this ARPA money sitting in city coffers, a lot of folks are looking at payday loans, selling plasma, and or moving into their automobiles. Landlords and utility companies do not care why it is taking the city so long. People need to know if that help is going to arrive in time or at all. In December the Rental Assistance monies- being handled by various other agencies and not the city- were only processed up through September. I applied in November. I assumed I would hear from someone by the end of February. I have not.)

If you had hired me to oversee the project*, in addition to 2020 income, I would first look to see if the applicant was receiving any other aid (unemployment, section 8, EBT, WIC, etc), and or if they had applied for other assistance (all the things listed previously, and Cares Act Rental Assistance, LiHeap, etc). Do they have dependent children? Disabilities?

Then to verify the information is true and accurate. If it has already been assessed by other agencies, that saves me a step. This part will be the most labor intensive, and where slow response times from other agencies, institutions, and the applicants will hold things up. (This is, quite frankly, why the city should have hired city resident contract workers directly to distribute these monies.)

I can’t think of any other way to distribute this money, fairly. If it goes by zip code or ward, or something else I would like to know that. I’d also like to know what the time frame is going to be.

Thank you,

Rachael Cailliach

*I would have set up a database specifically for the ARPA funds. Or had a field entered in the existing database for the $500 check. I’d also have set up automatic email updates to applicants, along with the determining criteria.

I would have estimated how many extra labor hours were needed to process the applications within a one-month time frame and hired the contract and temporary workers needed. This would require working out labor for each step. Data entry of the applications, basic need assessment and ranking, per each criterion, and then overall, and then actually contacting state agencies and the applicant to verify the information. I’d have contacted the EDD and other agencies to find out what sort of response time we would be looking at for verification.

I also would have checked with the EDD to see if there were any unemployed City residents with the necessary skills and hired them either as contract workers through the city or through an agency. (Agencies take part of the wages paid, so through the city would be better.)

10,000 applications divided by 20 working days in month equals 500 applications processed per day. Reasonable expectation of 4-8 applications processed a day, so let’s say 5 per day. That’s one hundred people working 8 hours a day, for 20 days. That’s $300,000 in wages at $15 an hour, putting the cost of administering the $5 million. Since $350,000 is missing from the $5 million, (700 checks at $500 each) I can only assume that you paid $50k more than my estimate. (And if that is true, I am sorry that the city didn’t factor that cost in to begin with, before promising 10k checks and delivering only 9300.)

In my scenario, 100 unemployed city residents also benefitted from this project. And one percent of that would be paid back to the city directly, and benefit the city coffers in other ways- sales tax, etc. Did 100 city residents benefit from employment in the current scenario?