Luzerne County nearing release of American Rescue Plan awards

Luzerne County Council has completed the last hurdle necessary to finalize which outside entities will collectively receive approximately $60 million in American Rescue Plan funding.

A vote on the actual awards is expected at council’s Feb. 14 meeting.

Council members still don’t know which approximately 76 entities are making the cut due to the process set up to evaluate applications.

Instead of relying on a council or administrative committee recommendation, the 11 council members decided to screen the applications themselves so they would all have an opportunity to participate. The county’s American Rescue consultant set up an online portal for council members to individually review and score the 139 outside applications based on uniform factors.

Council members unanimously voted this week on final sorting parameters needed for Booth Management Consulting to generate the recipient list for public release and council ratification.

For starters, council decided no entity will receive more than one award and that the highest-scored submission would be selected in that scenario.

As a result, Booth eliminated two projects totaling $951,000 from the proposed final list and added the next three projects in the ranking that are collectively seeking $158,000.

Council also agreed at Tuesday’s meeting it would only fund projects that meet federal eligibility requirements, which ruled out six projects seeking more than $866,000.

Finally, council altered the minimum score required for projects to advance because only 24 projects with $12.3 million in eligible requests met the preliminary 60-point target.

The score was reduced to 34.56 points, which will allow awards for 76 projects, according to a chart Booth released this week.

County Acting Manager Brian Swetz said Booth will prepare a list identifying all 76 recipients and projects along with the allocation amounts for distribution to county council members and the public before the Feb. 14 meeting.

Because the list of awards is based on council’s independent scoring and parameters, council members are not supposed to alter it because adding and deleting once the names are released would defeat the purpose of the evaluation system that had been set up, council members have said.

Council Vice Chairman John Lombardo said this is a unique situation because council members did not choose recipients through discussion, debate and majority preference.

While this process was intended to prevent bias and outside intervention and lobbying, Lombardo said he is uneasy having no idea which recipients will appear on the award list and how both council and the public will react to the end result.

Lombardo credited council members for respecting the evaluation process and abstaining from scoring individual applicants if they had a conflict of interest.

After deducting the outside earmarks, internal county government projects and allocations already approved, the county will have $17.2 million in remaining American Rescue funds, according to Booth Management’s latest report posted with Tuesday’s council agenda at luzernecounty.org.

Councilman Brian Thornton told his colleagues there is now discussion of a new federal update that would allow at least $10 million in American Rescue funds to be used for road repairs and replacements.

He asked Booth Management to research this development, saying it could help the county address more needed work on county-owned roadways to relieve the burden on county taxpayers.

Company head Robin Booth cautioned federal changes must be published in a final form before they are official, promising to brief council if that happens.

Lombardo said he was encouraged by the possibility cited by Thornton and would support earmarking an additional $5 million to $10 million of the remaining funds for county-owned road projects if that work becomes eligible.