As Bangor city councilors work through the 60 requests for pandemic relief funding, some applicants are frustrated with the city’s decision-making process and timeline.
Bangor has been working to dole out the more than $20 million in federal pandemic relief funding after Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act. Local organizations were first able to apply for a piece of the funding in April, nearly two years after the city began receiving the one-time pot in May 2021.
Those applications for funding then went through a review and scoring process by a volunteer panel overseen by the Heart of Maine United Way.
Now, more than three years after the start of the pandemic, local organizations are just beginning to learn if they have been selected to receive a portion of Bangor’s pandemic relief funding. Applicants who have been denied say the council’s drawn out process defeats the purpose of the fund’s intent and may have hurt the community.
Betsy Lundy, executive director of the Downtown Bangor Partnership, said she felt like the review and scoring process done by an external body “seemed to pit a bunch of nonprofits against one another in a cage fight” and gave councilors a subjective summary of each proposal.
Downtown Bangor Partnership’s $1.2 million pandemic relief funding request to hire a New York-based company to clean and patrol downtown was among the 30 applications that councilors cut from the running to receive any funding last week. The United Way review panel ranked Downtown Bangor Partnership’s proposal second to last.
While Lundy was certain the volunteer review panel did its best and had good intentions, she said the panel members’ opinions and vision for the city moving forward may differ from those of the councilors.
Lundy appreciates that the council is working hard, making tough choices and are scrutinized by the public, but felt the relief money should have been given out sooner so it could be put to use and make a difference in the community.
“I understand it’s an unprecedented amount of money and daunting to think about how to prioritize and allocate it, but at the same time, I think that money could’ve been working for our community a long time ago,” Lundy said. “There were certainly organizations in dire situations who would have benefited from a quicker decision-making process.”
Jeremiah Titus, secretary for the Bangor firefighters union, Local 772 of the International Association of Firefighters, said he feels waiting to delegate the ARPA money went against what the funding was originally intended to do, “that is, protect cities and infrastructure to get through the pandemic.”
The firefighter union’s application requested more than $817,000 to provide bonuses to first responders, which the review panel ranked 51st of 60. It was also denied funding from councilors.
Furthermore, seeking input from a third party review panel further delayed any decisions on what organizations would get funding, which “defeats the purpose of the emergency funding,” Titus said.
“The federal government was very quick to get this money approved and sent out, but when it got to Bangor, it just sat for years,” he said.
Titus said this delay in awarding also came in tandem with a rise in homelessness, substance use disorder and opioid overdoses in Bangor. He believes these could have been mitigated if this funding had been made available earlier to various organizations.
“If we had gotten ahead of it a year ago, who could we have saved?” Titus said. “Our request aside, the inability to get the money out and where it needed to be has caused further harm to the community.”
Rick Fournier, Bangor city council chair, said the city decided to partner with the United Way because the organization has a successful history of organizing review panels and he feels the evaluation helped city leaders narrow the field of applicants.
While Fournier was hoping the city could begin dishing out funding last year and have it spent by the November 2022 election, he said the city’s interest in working with Penobscot County delayed the process.
Despite this, Fournier feels councilors are now working through applications as quickly and fairly as possible, and have made a final decision on more than half of the 60 that were submitted.
“It’s a process — we’re not going to sit down and do it in one night, but I think we’ve made some progress,” Fournier said. “I’d love for it to happen faster, but I want to give everyone a fair shake.”
Tate Sullivan, executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Mid-Maine, however, is thankful the city council asked United Way to help review and score applications, as it “provided an unbiased viewpoint on the applications.”
“Any time you get a pot of federal money like this, you have to create a review process that’s as fair and transparent as possible,” Sullivan said. “It’s a large pot of money and I know the city councilors want to be prudent about spending the money in a way that the city feels good about.”
The $260,000 request from Big Brothers Big Sisters of Mid-Maine to establish a mentoring hub for Bangor-area youth facing adversity is still in the running to receive relief dollars from the city.
