Bangor cut half of the 60 organizations that asked Bangor for a piece of the city’s more than $20 million in pandemic relief funding out of the running.
In a workshop Tuesday, Bangor city councilors went over a list of the 43 remaining applications for American Rescue Plan Act funding that hadn’t yet been considered and discussed in a prior meeting. Most of those requests were given lower rankings by a volunteer review panel orchestrated by Heart of Maine United Way.
The narrowing down of applications is Bangor’s latest step in the slow process of doling out the remaining $16 million in relief funding the city received from the federal government beginning in May 2021. Tuesday’s workshop was also the third weekly workshop councilors have held for the sole purpose of making decisions on what to do with the pandemic relief funding.
Of the 43 applications that were named, councilors voted to keep 13 requests eligible to potentially receive funding, which will come at a future council meeting. Those remaining requests total about $6.4 million and range from $2 million for Northern Light Acadia Hospital to $50,000 for Literacy Volunteers of Bangor.
Councilors, however, specified that keeping an application eligible for funding does not guarantee the organization will receive funding.
There are other still-eligible applications that councilors discussed in previous workshops because they received higher scores from the review panel. Councilors are waiting for clarifying questions to be answered before they make a final funding decision on many of the applications.
The other 30 applications that were taken out of the running to receive any funding ranged from a $5 million request from Dignity First to a $10,000 application from the Parkside Children’s Learning Center.
Councilors also rejected a $817,000 application from the Bangor firefighters union, Local 772 of the International Association of Firefighters, to provide bonuses to first responders the week after about 50 Bangor first responders attended a city council meeting to beg for funding.
The union’s application was ranked 51st because the review panel had questions about how one-time funding would retain existing employees and attract new ones, but the panel ultimately recommended the city approve the union’s funding request.
The council also denied Downtown Bangor Partnership’s $1.2 million request to hire a New York-based company to clean and patrol downtown.
The United Way’s review panel ranked that application second to last and recommended councilors don’t fulfill the request because the idea “seems redundant and problematic” and “feels like a punitive approach” to addressing symptoms of Bangor’s unhoused residents.
In addition to considerably narrowing down the pool of which organizations are eligible for funding, councilors also revisited a $597,500 request from Wellspring to add up to 20 new substance use treatment beds.
Councilors first considered Wellspring’s application on July 5, but tabled it until the organization answered a few questions related to how it plans to staff the expansion.
Councilors ultimately voted unanimously to grant Wellspring’s request in full, contingent on the nonprofit receiving funding for that expansion from the state. The request will come before councilors at a future city council meeting for formal and final approval.
