In an effort to get city officials more accustomed to meeting requirements for a community development block grant, the Common Council has approved entering an agreement with an organization that specializes in reporting necessary for the grant.
The city received $500,000 in funds via a CDGB grant for a construction project at Ann and Franklin streets.
The city has entered into an agreement with Vierbicher, which specializes in assisting communities with grants like this one.
“With that grant comes specific requirements for reporting, such as financial journals, block grant disbursement, equal opportunity reports and documentation, federal labor reports and documentation (and) quarterly reports to name a few,” Public Works Director Brad Marquardt said. “Currently, nobody on staff here has a good working relationship with these grants and reporting requirements, and they are pretty stringent at the Department of Administration to make sure everything is correctly documented and presented.”
Marquardt said his staff sent RFPs to six consultants and received four responses, including Vierbicher’s. The Public Works Committee recommended Vierbicher.
“I know there have been questions in the past regarding why we don’t do this in-house,” City Manager Cameron Clapper said. “Just to further Brad’s point, while we don’t have experience with this program specifically, some of us, myself included, have worked on these grants. The time commitment is intense and significant. This might be something of hyperbole, but only slightly, to tell you at different times with these grants. You fill out the forms and there are some very minor things that seem to equate to dotting an ‘i’ or crossing a ‘t’ somewhere and you can end up in a back-and-forth to provide the right material that could be three or four emails and take two days because they are so specific on what’s available and what’s allowed.”
Alderwoman Stephanie Goettl, who is a council representative on the Public Works Committee, said she would like to see more of an in-house approach to projects like this in the future.
“This did pass the Public Works Committee, and I have no issue with this,” she said. “I think the Public Works Commission did have a good discussion on this. I would like to see staff take a more important role with this moving forward. We want them to see this as not just using the consultant to do the work, but to learn from the consultant on how to do this. It is quite a substantial cost to use a consultant. We’re hoping that this will be an opportunity to say moving forward that the staff does have experience and we don’t have to have a consultant do this. That’s what I got from the discussion.”
For more on the agreement, pick up the March 16 edition of the Whitewater Register.
