Come Back With More Detail And We’ll Talk: Council Delays Plan For Rescue Money
Birmingham’s efforts to distribute millions of dollars of federal American Rescue Plan funding hit a snag Tuesday after councilors took issue with the vagueness of Mayor Randall Woodfin’s proposed allocations.
The city received the first half of its ARP funding, $74 million, in May; it will receive the second $74 million tranche next year. The council has already allocated some of that first half — about $17.5 million — toward premium pay for city employees who worked through the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Tuesday, Woodfin proposed to divide the remaining $53.1 million into the following categories: $3 million for community-based public safety initiatives, $1.5 million to COVID-19 response, $18 million for neighborhood revitalization projects, $18.75 million for public transportation, $4.5 million for small business support, $1.1 million for employee vacation buyouts, $4.75 million for tourism and $1.5 million for grant writing and professional services to pursue other federal funding sources.
Kelvin Datcher, Woodfin’s director of intergovernmental affairs, said the proposal was meant to allocate the ARP money into broad “buckets,” and that all projects and proposals within those categories would still require council approval.
“This allows us to begin that process by setting dollars into budget lines,” he said.
But councilors balked anyway, saying they were blindsided by parts of the mayor’s proposal. District 2 Councilor Hunter Williams told Datcher that he felt “bamboozled,” as his discussions with Woodfin’s team had omitted the $18.75 allocation to public transportation.
“We met this past week, or I thought we did,” Williams said, “only a matter of days ago, and there’s about $20 million that wasn’t discussed when we met … I am disappointed that we had an hour-and-a-half meeting and there was an omission of one-third of what’s on this sheet today.”
Other councilors, including District 3’s Valerie Abbott and District 8’s Steven Hoyt, lamented the lack of specific reasoning behind the allocations.
“How did we arrive at these figures?” Abbott asked. “Clearly there is someone who looked at these issues … That’s what I want. I want to know what these figures were based upon and what we can do with the money in these categories. I know these figures were not just pulled out of the sky.”
Woodfin responded by saying that the numbers were “pulled out of the sky” — including the $18 million allocated to neighborhood revitalization projects, which will be divided evenly among the nine council districts.
“None of these other buckets have any detail because they’re just buckets,” he said. “What you all are voting for is not trees, it’s literally the forest.”
The council remained unconvinced, opting instead to delay the item until a committee of the whole meeting when more details could be provided. That meeting will likely happen July 29 or Aug. 2, Council President William Parker said, and the proposal will come before the council again Aug. 3.
Woodfin had scheduled a joint news conference with the council to discuss the ARP allocations after Tuesday’s meeting; shortly after the council’s vote, his office announced that the conference had been indefinitely postponed.
What led the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to crash in India with 242 people aboard?
"It just appears to me that the airplane is unable to climb," former NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti tells NPR. Several explanations could account for that, the aviation expert says.
In first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Hollywood giants sue AI firm for copyright infringement
Disney and Universal's 110-page lawsuit against Midjourney claims the AI player stole "countless" copyrighted works to train its software.
Trump’s efforts to defund NPR and PBS playing out in Congress and the courts
Trump and other Republicans want to rescind more than $1 billion in federal funding already approved for NPR and PBS. The president also issued an executive order intended to prevent federal agencies from funding the two public broadcasting networks.
Sen. Padilla forcibly removed from DHS press conference in Los Angeles
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., was forcibly removed and handcuffed at a Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Alabama drops four places in national child well-being rankings
Alabama ranked 43rd nationally for child well-being in the latest KIDS COUNT data book from by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The GOP’s massive bill would benefit the rich the most — while hitting the poor
The top 10% of earners in the U.S. would see the biggest gains under the GOP tax and spending package, according to congressional forecasters, but those at the bottom of the income ladder would be worse off.