Covid Relief
By Albert B. Kelly
From fiscal standpoint, it has been difficult to measure just how much the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted smaller counties, cities, and townships throughout New Jersey over the past nine months or how the pandemic will impact things in 2021. Only now, as we approach the end of calendar year are we able to see the extent of the fiscal impact.
For some jurisdictions such as those charged with coordinating all aspects of public health services, there are direct pandemic-related costs. For smaller communities not providing direct public health services, the impacts are just as real, but they’re not quite as direct. What I mean to say is that for some, the fiscal challenges they face come as result of what they’ve had to expend responding to the pandemic while for others, the fiscal challenge is what they never received because of the pandemic.
This is not a distinction without a difference and this much became clear with some of the relief programs provided by the state and federal government. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the efforts of officials on the state and federal level to try and filter help down to the county and municipal level, but assistance cannot be one-size-fits-all. It has to have some degree flexibility to be effective.
I say that because when you read through the guidelines on these packages, there is almost exclusive emphasis on eligibility being tied to costs incurred as a direct result of the pandemic. This might include the costs of purchasing Covid testing supplies, personal protective equipment, the hiring of medical personnel to perform specific pandemic-related functions, or specific overtime directly tied to responding to the pandemic.
Alongside of the eligibility restrictions, every program emphasizes the fact that there can be no duplication of programs- meaning that if program A might pay for something, you have no business asking program B to pay for that thing. This is understandable as we cannot afford double-dipping but it does provide a way for multiple programs to give the appearance of assistance without actually having to put the money on the street.
What many of these programs overlook is the revenues that small cities and towns will never realize because of the lost weeks, days, and hours when everything came to a standstill. This might include a significant number of projects that normally pull permits but were put on hold over much of the year because of the pandemic. This might also include lost municipal court hours or various fees from parks and recreation programs never collected because everything was shut down.
For Bridgeton and many similar communities, deficits are not confined to one big budget category or area, but emerge out of several dozen lesser line items in the budget. The need is not reflective of some large affirmative expenditure we made, but reflective of what did not happen in a hundred small but significant ways over the past months.
This matters because individually and collectively, one way or another, these areas are tied to funding personnel and services across the whole spectrum of local government. My point is that some jurisdictions have had to put a lot of money out directly dealing with the pandemic and if that is the case, these state and federal programs are straightforward enough. But for the jurisdictions facing budget holes not because of what they’ve had to spend, but from what they were never able to collect in a hundred lesser areas, the programs are far less certain.
I am not unmindful of the challenges facing state and federal officials as they decide how to distribute help and how to be good stewards of that help, but from the perspective of smaller cities and townships as well as counties, these programs have many qualifiers with multiple ways to keep the money while still getting the glow from a headline about how this town or that city has been awarded some potential “up to” amount. Being eligible and pleading your case will be the big challenge facing many of the smaller jurisdictions around the state.
One suggestion is to cut by half the amount of aid potentially available to smaller jurisdictions around the state in favor of a lesser guaranteed sum that will allow them to backfill the revenue holes from all of the day-to-day things that people did not or could not do because of the pandemic.