In the village of Tangipahoa, new Mayor Sheila Martin is eyeing improvements to the water system or police service.
In Zachary, city officials may look to improve the gas system. The City of New Orleans has already announced it would end pandemic-area furloughs.
The $1.9 trillion COVID-19 recovery act promises a financial windfall for Louisiana parish and municipal governments totaling about $1.8 billion, but only a few officials in the Baton Rouge area have a ready list of projects identified for the dollars.
In recent interviews since President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act on March 11, local leaders in parish, city and town governments provided a more cautious wait-and-see approach toward the largesse headed their way.
"I guess I come from an old school, you know, don't count your chickens till they hatch," said Scott Byrd, Gonzales' chief administrative officer and city clerk. "When the $4 million comes across and into the city of Gonzales checking account, then I'll believe it."
Gonzales, a city of nearly 11,000 people, has been estimated to receive $4.04 million.
Under the legislation — the same deal that sent $1,400 checks to individuals, extended unemployment benefits and separately set aside money for higher and secondary education — Congress has provided $130.2 billion for local governments, split evenly among counties and municipalities.
At $167.2 million, East Baton Rouge Parish's city-parish government is line to receive the second most amount of money among all Louisiana parishes, according to a National Association of Counties estimate.
The capital parish is benefiting under the federal legislation from its consolidated government status and also from a federal poverty formula that were both used to calculate its allocation.
The award represents about half of the city-parish's 2021 general fund budget, but officials weren't ready to say how they'll spend the money as they waited to learn more about the legislation.
Officials in neighboring Livingston and Ascension parishes took a similar tack. Livingston and Ascension would receive $27.3 million and $24.6 million, respectively.
A few, like Central Mayor David Barrow, said they didn't know how much they were receiving or weren’t even aware they were supposed to be receiving money.
“I have not received any information about receiving any money, nothing," Barrow said. "No one has communicated a word to me about money or anything, from the federal government, the state government or the parish.”
Early estimates say Central would receive $10.8 million from the stimulus act.
Other officials who had received word but weren't ready to identify specific projects until they met with other officials, like Donaldsonville Mayor Leroy Sullivan, suggested they had plenty of road and drainage needs to address, though it's not clear how easily that kind of bread-and-butter need could be met with the new stimulus dollars.
The legislation doesn't directly identify roads or drainage as uses for the money but also doesn't exclude them, though it talks in other areas about intermodal transportation.
One major way this legislation is different from the CARES Act relief bill last year, some officials said, is that local governments can use the money to fill budget holes created by the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.
In a prepared statement, Darryl Gissel, the Baton Rouge city-parish’s chief administrative officer, added that the current "unofficial guidance" also says the money can be used for "economic initiatives for the community, and infrastructure investments such as water, sewer and broadband.”
According to the legislation, cities and parishes can also use the money to provide assistance to households, small businesses, non-profits and industries that were negatively impacted by the pandemic – like tourism, travel and the hospitality industry.
The aid could also be used to boost the pay of “essential” employees who had to work throughout shutdowns and in response to the pandemic, which opens that up to an array of sectors like law enforcement and other first responders.
This "premium" pay boost could provide as much as $13 per hour extra and benefit a single employee no more than $25,000.
The bill only really limits municipal governments from using the funds to offset revenue loss that wasn’t caused by the pandemic and to supplement their pension funds, a need the Baton Rouge city-parish has.
Its unfunded pension liability was last reported, in 2019, to total nearly $600 million.
John Diez, the Ascension Parish chief administrative officer, said he, as several other regional officials indicated, was waiting to see what federal rules are promulgated to further define how the money can be spent.
The parish is in no hurry to spend money and wants to do it in a way that is well thought-out, he said. The legislation gives local governments until the end of 2024 to use the funds.
Louisiana Division of Administration Commissioner Jay Dardenne said he believes the U.S. Department of Treasury is the federal agency that will create the rules because Treasury did the same for the CARES Act.
Under the expected rules, local leaders could still have plenty of discretion in spending, in particular in provisions that allow spending with nonprofits, special purpose units of state or local government, and other non-local government entities, Dardenne said.
"There'll be a lot of hands out, of course, and people saying that they're entitled to compensation from the language of the act and a lot of it will be discretionary from the state and local governments but also to be directed by whatever the guidelines say once the guidelines are issued," he said.
If the CARES Act is any guide, Dardenne said, even those rules can also change over time as more questions are raised and answered. He said the CARES Act guidance was "a constant flow of guidelines, clarifications and questions begetting more questions."
Some parishes and towns in the region haven't seen major revenue losses, if at all, due to the pandemic because of their industrial sectors, which have benefited from the need for protective equipment, cleaning materials and other equipment.
That is one of the reasons, Byrd, the Gonzales official, said he wasn't certain the city would receive any of the estimated $4 million total.
But Dardenne said the new pandemic relief bill, which congressional aides said was designed to jump-start the economy, appears to be a blanket award to local governments regardless of their post-pandemic financial status. Only the uses are restricted. Parish and cities that can't show a revenue loss from the pandemic will have to find other ways to spend the money, Dardenne said.
"For those parishes or cities that did not experience a revenue loss, they are going to have pigeon-hole their expenditures into the other authorized uses," he said.
The villages of Morgana and Grosse Tete avoided cutbacks to services and employee pay due to the pandemic, their mayors said.
Morganza Mayor Clarence “Woots” Wells said he has been looking for ways to fund improvements to the sewage system and the stimulus may be an option.
A few pipe joints have separated over the years and require the village to use pumps more frequently. Though it hasn’t caused any serious disruption to water flows, large rainstorms can cause water to back up and the system will likely need to be addressed before it worsens.
The Pointe Coupee Parish village, which has a population of less than 900 residents, is expected to receive the lowest per capita share of federal relief money in the region.
“You’re always expecting more,” Wells said. “it’s a double-edged sword. Who wants less?”
Michael Wallace, legislative director for the National League of Cities, warned, however, that the revenue estimates were subject to change for a number of reasons.
For instance, communities with populations of fewer than 50,000 people have had their funding award capped at 75% of their 2020 budget.
That would appear to affect a community like the village of Tangipahoa, which is estimated to receive about $314,520, though it had a 2020 budget of $198,500, an annual audit says.
Based on the 75% limit, the village of Tangipahoa would get no more than around $148,890.
Tangipahoa's estimated award was the second highest per-capita in the Baton Rouge region at $495 per person.
Also, the Congressional Research Service put the funding estimates data together that are now being circulated, Wallace said, but a lot of detailed information for smaller communities wasn't available and some municipalities were left out.
When the Treasury Department finalizes the funding list, money for those left-out communities will come out of every other town's share of the dollars, he said.
"There is the potential still for big swings, one way or the other, in these (funding) estimates because frankly not every municipality is listed that ought to be," Wallace said.
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