Chapel Hill and Orange County residents are facing an upcoming fiscal year without new grants from a national recovery plan, but local officials are confident that area budgets won’t suffer as a result.
Town and county officials said the lack of new stimulus funds will not adversely affect the budgets of either Chapel Hill or Orange County.
“We feel pretty good about where we stand right now,” said Orange County Financial Services Director Clarence Grier.
The $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awarded Orange County $1.5 million in grants, Grier said. The amount of funds the county received was less than 1 percent of the county budget.
Chapel Hill received seven grants, totalling more than $10 million, said Town Director of Business Management Ken Pennoyer.
He said the stimulus had its intended effect on the area and created a small, but needed, boost.
“It was a one-time shot in the arm, so we couldn’t rely on anything continuous because we would’ve been in a hole when it dried up,” Pennoyer said.
The purpose of the stimulus was not to make it easier to balance the budget, but to make additional projects possible that the town would not have been able to fund, said Assistant Director of Business Management Jeanne Tate.
If the town had not received stimulus money, many of the projects would have still gone to the town council but might not have received funding, Tate said.