Luzerne County Council to vote next week on ARP plans

Luzerne County Council members agreed Tuesday they will vote next week on various allocation plans to determine how they will proceed with up to $60 million in federal American Rescue Plan awards to outside entities.

A vote on the actual entities receiving awards — and those amounts — can’t occur until council approves a plan. Even if a council majority gets behind one path next week, individual awards would be made at a subsequent meeting, council members said.

During Tuesday’s special session focused solely on the outside earmarks, council members discussed three proposals that are all posted as agenda attachments at luzernecounty.org:

• Councilman Matthew Mitchell’s proposal to cap allocations by category, which would allow 117 eligible projects to receive funding. This plan would fully fund approximately 84% of the projects and require the others to specify what work they could complete with a reduced allotment. The caps: municipalities and municipal authorities, $2 million; nonprofits, $500,000; and small businesses, $100,000.

• Councilman Tim McGinley’s proposal to both cap awards by category and require recipients to pick up more of the project cost through matches based on the scores their applications received from council. As scores decrease, the applicant match increases. His proposed caps: municipalities, $2 million; authorities, $1 million; nonprofits, $500,000; private businesses, $100,000; and community groups, $250,000.

• Councilman Kevin Lescavage’s proposal to decrease many awards based on his analysis of amounts that are fair and reasonable.

However, Councilman Gregory S. Wolovich Jr. said he believes council should start by voting on the original plan to fully fund those with the highest scores until awards reach the $60 million threshold set by council.

McGinley said he does not believe many council members are in support of the original list.

Councilman Chris Perry said he was originally committed to the score-based/full-funding option but had strong reservations after discovering five applicants were not part of the original scoring portal and that some of his colleagues had encountered technological issues during scoring.

“It changes things,” Perry said.

Council members scored the five missed entities after the fact, and all received higher scores than some already on the list. Robin Booth, of Columbia, Maryland-based Booth Management Consulting — the county’s American Rescue consultant — said the county was still able to fund all five without exceeding the $60 million total. This was accomplished by eliminating contingencies that had been included in some applicant requests, which freed up $4.4 million, Booth said. With this plan, 81 projects would be fully funded, with the exception of contingencies, she said.

Council members also have not determined what to do about a $735,000 allocation to the Dallas Area Municipal Authority (DAMA) due to a criminal complaint recently filed against the entity over allegations of untreated sewage dumping into Toby Creek. Its American Rescue request was among those with the highest scores.

In response to council comments about cutting the allocation, DAMA Executive Director Thomas G. Keiper sent council a communication maintaining its removal from consideration could cause “federal compliance issues” for the county.

The activities alleged in the complaint occurred many years ago and stem from sanitary sewer overflows that occur in many sewer collection systems throughout the state, his letter said. DAMA has already paid civil penalties for those overflows and “questions whether the new allegations rise to the level of criminal activity,” it said.

“As you are aware, DAMA is presumed innocent until proven guilty,”

DAMA has spent millions of dollars trying to correct sanitary sewer overflow problems over the last few years and has more projects under contract to help eliminate or minimize this problem, it said. The authority’s American Rescue award would help address this problem, and it would be unfair to penalize the authority, it said.

The March 14 meeting will start at 6 p.m. at the county courthouse on River Street in Wilkes-Barre.