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The Daily Tar Heel

New stimulus funds absent from Chapel Hill, Orange County budget

Local officials not concerned

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.

“You have to pay for policemen’s salaries before you buy new buses,” she said.

The largest town grants funded pedestrian safety improvements on major town roads and funding for new buses, Pennoyer said. Most of the work was done by contractors, so the impact on local employment is hard to determine, he said.

“It’s hard to say whether they hired additional people or what they would’ve been doing if they hadn’t had these jobs,” he said.

But it was work nonetheless.

“We got the benefit of those projects being finished ahead of schedule, and it also kept people working,” Pennoyer said.

The largest amount of the money Orange County received went to the prevention of homelessness, Grier said, a cause that the county probably would not have been able to address as aggressively without the funds.

The Department of Social Services will get $1 million through the grant, ending in 2012, and the money will help people who lost their homes or are at risk of losing their homes because of unemployment, said Social Services Director Nancy Coston.

Coston said temporary workers were hired to help implement the grant money.

“You kind of had to stop what you were doing to get the grant put together,” she said. “But it was worth it because of the people who we are able to help.”

But even though municipal finances may be secure without grant funding, school budgets will suffer from the loss, Grier said.

Contact the City Editor at city@dailytarheel.com.

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