Denton City Council okays stimulus ordinance

by Chris Speight of of North Texas Daily

The economic stimulus bill could overwhelm city officials, but an ordinance passed by the city means not every grant pursued will have to go before the council.

The council recently passed an ordinance giving city manager George Campbell the power to apply for specific grants included in the stimulus bill, without having to ask the council first to approve them. City officials don't know how much federal money Denton could get but grants could fund the police and fire departments, energy efficiency in city buildings, school lunches and reducing diesel emissions.

A committee has been formed to research and report on the many different potential grants that are available. Campbell appointed Barbara Ross, the community development administrator of Denton, to head the committee.

Campbell has more than 23 years of experience with the job and has worked with many different types of grants over the years, Ross said.

The ordinance is just a precautionary measure, and the City Council is keeping close tabs on the actions taken by Campbell and the grant committee, said Fred Greene, assistant city manager.

"The way these things work, is when you get the information that enables you to apply for the grant, you're given a small window to do that in," Greene said. "If you don't have an ordinance like this, you can conceivably miss that window."

The action is to avoid repetitiveness in council sessions, as well as to make the time constraints less restrictive, Greene said.

"The reason we need to work so quickly is that there are certain grants that we are competing against many other cities in America for," Greene said. "One example of this would be a grant that proposes to float the money for three years worth of police salaries while the economy is coming back up."

Greene said a grant such as this is referred to as a competitive grant.

"Competitive based grants often have extensive application processes, and they may have qualifiers like, only cities above 50,000 people can apply, for example," Kenneth Banks, the manager of the division of environmental quality, said. "The grants are awarded to those entities that are deemed 'the best,' as demonstrated in the entity's responses to the grant request."

Banks said that competitive grants could take time and effort to apply for, so the city has to carefully choose the ones that have a high likelihood of being picked and that meet the goals of the city.

Ross said that the other types of grants being dealt with by the committee are formula grants.

"Formula grants use a specific set of statistics to determine the allocation amount for each city, county and state," Ross said. "For instance, the community development block grant looks at the percentage of a community's low-income population and its age of housing. Communities with more low-income households and older housing get a higher percentage of the funding."

Banks, Ross and Greene all said they agreed the overall stimulus package is extremely complex and it is quite normal to be completely confused by the entire thing.

"The grant funds need to be expended fairly quickly. That's why this committee was formed," Ross said. "The ordinance was intended to allow city staff and the city manager to not necessarily make a final decision on a bill, but to have the ability when the decision is made, that we should apply for certain grants, that the process is already in place for the application to be submitted."