Housing, parks, road repairs get slice of $108M in Kent County COVID-19 relief funds

Downtown Grand Rapids

FILE PHOTO - Blue Bridge in downtown Grand Rapids on Friday, Oct. 18, 2013. (Cory Morse | MLive.com)

GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Affordable housing, parks and trails improvements and road repairs were among 30 projects that were approved Thursday by the Kent County Board of Commissioners for a piece of $108 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds.

More than 300 organizations, ranging from hospitals to community nonprofits to arts and entertainment groups, submitted requests for the funds. But with demand for funds far exceeding supply, commissioners were able to fund a small slice of the proposals, and some complained the process was flawed and became overly political.

“This was never going to be easy, and it hasn’t been easy,” said Stan Stek, who chairs the 19-member county board. “The fact is we ended up with $3 billion dollars of asks from our community, and when that happens it guaranteed most of you out there would be disappointed.”

Three of the highest funded proposals included $17.5 million for the Kent County Revolving Housing Fund, $15 million for Kent County parks and trails, and $8.5 million for roads primarily located within the county’s townships.

During Thursday’s board meeting, commissioners were frequently critical of the process for doling out the funds.

While the county used public feedback, county leader input and an assessment of funding eligibility, some commissioners said the process was hurt by “politics,” and that the endeavor got “bogged down in some pet projects.” Two of the commission’s three Black members said communities of color were being shortchanged.

“I have to say that this list made me pause,” said Commissioner Michelle McCloud, who represents the city of Kentwood. “It made me pretty upset to see that a community that bore the brunt of the pandemic is so minimally represented in this list.”

McCloud said she was pleased that two organizations, the Urban League of West Michigan and the Hispanic Center of West Michigan, were awarded funds to start community development financial institutions. The Urban League received $4 million for the endeavor, while the Hispanic center got $2 million.

However, she said she was upset that the Diatribe, a performing arts organization, was cut from the list of projects set to receive funds. County staff last month recommended the group’s proposal to create a new headquarters in the Burton Heights Business District receive $2 million.

“The Diatribe was rated 12th out of all of the community projects,” she said. “They are not on this list for a very political reason, and I’m not going to bring it out. I do not think that this is the way we should be moving this forward.”

Marcel Price, the Diatribe’s executive director and former poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids, said he was “outraged” that his group’s proposal wasn’t funded.

“This was stolen from us,” he said. “This process was a very thorough process and began with consultants who were totally unbiased consultants, and they gave us one of the top ratings that any project could receive.”

Speaking after the meeting, he suggested the reason some Republican county commissioners opposed his group’s funding request is because they viewed his organization as supporting “defund the police,” Black Lives Matter and “want to bring “drag queens in the classrooms.”

“That’s not anything that we do,” said Price, who said he believes in the words “Black Lives Matter” but is not a member of the organization.

Stek, the chair of the Kent County Board of Commissioners, said board members had sharply different opinions on the Diatribe project.

“It had a lot of 5′s and it had a lot of 1′s, which means to me that you had one political perspective that tended to support it and another political perspective that didn’t support it or didn’t support it very highly,” he said, describing the board’s process of ranking projects on a scale of 1 to 5.

Ultimately, the Diatribe project — which was several Democrats on the board spoke in favor of — did not have enough support among the board to receive an award, Stek said. The Kent County Board of Commissioners has a Republican majority.

One Republican board member, Matt Kallman, said he would have liked to have seen more “due diligence” done on the Diatribe’s proposal because of the organization’s “size and the project size.”

“I think it’s the right choice that it didn’t end up making the cut,” he said.

The Diatribe became a registered nonprofit in 2016, and its most recent publicly available IRS tax return showed it received $91,104 in contributions, gifts and grants in 2019.

Price, the group’s executive director, said his organization had the ability to effectively manage and use the federal COVID-19 dollars. He said, for example, that the Diatribe successfully used $250,000 in federal CARES act funds during the pandemic.

“The budget for our organization is getting closer to a million dollars,” he said. “We were given a quarter of a million in CARES act funding and didn’t only spend it great, but we spent it as one of the best recipients of CARES acts funding during the pandemic. We were great stewards of those county dollars.”

Stek acknowledged that there were lots of different views about what should and shouldn’t be funded. That’s not surprising, he said, because the county board is comprised of a diverse group of elected officials, each of whom represents a community with distinct interests and priorities.

He pointed, for example, to the $8.5 million reserved for roads maintained by the Kent County Road Commission. Those roads are largely in the county’s townships and not the urban core.

“Would someone in the urban core look at that and say does that do anything for me — unless you travel to the upper part of Kent County in order to go there for recreation, you could say that doesn’t do much for me,” he said. “On the other hand if you live in Algoma Township and you use those roads everyday, you could say that changes my life.”

Ultimately, the board had to come up with a list of projects that would satisfy all its members, Stek said, and that meant no member was completely pleased with the final result.

“Those of you that represent the urban core had a spread that looked one way,” he said. “Those of you that live and represent the suburban donut had a spread that looked quite different. Those of you that live and represent the rural areas had something that looked quite different.”

Here’s a look at the projects that received funding:

$17,500,000 ∙ Kent County Revolving Housing Fund ∙ Kent County/Fund Administrator TBD

$500,000 ∙ Kent County Equitable Housing Initiative ∙ Housing Next

$500,000 ∙ Four Star Theatre Renovation ∙ Marcus Ringnalda

$4,000,000 ∙ Boston Square Hub ∙ Amplify GR

$2,000,000 ∙ Krause Memorial Library ∙ City of Rockford

$1,000,000 ∙ The Junior Achievement Free Enterprise Center ∙ Junior Achievement of the Michigan Great Lakes

$2,000,000 ∙ Nourish Tomorrow Advancement Campaign ∙ Feeding America West Michigan

$1,000,000 ∙ Preventative Animal Control by Increasing Pet Owner Access to Veterinary Care ∙ Community Spay Neuter Initiative Partnership (C-SNIP)

$3,923,356 ∙ Behavioral Health Crisis Center ∙ Kent County/Network 180

$15,000,000 ∙ Kent County Greenway/Parks ∙ Kent County

$2,837,500 ∙ School Safety Radio Network ∙ Kent County/Kent County Sheriff’s Office

$6,000,000 ∙ Medical Examiner Facility ∙ Kent County

$3,800,000 ∙ Lead Remediation - Paint, Pipe and Training ∙ Kent County/Kent County Health Department

$1,500,000 ∙ Sports Complex Expansion ∙ West Michigan Sports Complex

$6,000,000 ∙ Wyoming City Center Bridge and Trail Activation ∙ City of Wyoming

$6,000,000 The Grand Agricultural Center of West Michigan Kent County Youth Agricultural Association ∙ Kent County Youth Agricultural Association

$6,000,000 ∙ John Ball Zoo

$1,000,000 ∙ Grand Rapids Public Museum West Entry and Gathering Space ∙ Grand Rapids Public Museum

$4,000,000 ∙ Kent County Domestic Violence Action Network ∙ Domestic Violence Community Coordinated Response Team

$8,500,000 ∙ Transforming Kent County’s Road Network ∙ Kent County Road Commission

$500,000 ∙ Capital Enhancements for Facilities Serving Older Adults ∙ Kent County/Area Agency on Aging of Western Michigan

$1,000,000 ∙ United Methodist Community House 900 ∙ United Methodist Community House

$3,000,000 ∙ PFAS Remediation - Water Main Extension in Cascade Township Phase I and II ∙ City of Grand Rapids/Cascade Township

$1,000,000 ∙ Fuel the Movement: Innovative Workforce Development for Economic Mobility ∙ Grand Rapids Center for Community Transformation

$1,000,000 ∙ West Michigan Construction Institute Phase II Expansion ∙ West Michigan Construction Institute

$138,000 ∙ SMB & Workforce Development Support & Training ∙ Wyoming/Kentwood Chamber of Commerce

$2,000,000 ∙ Community, Economic and Workforce Development Through A Community Development Financial Institutions Fund in Kent County’s Hispanic Community ∙ Hispanic Center of West Michigan

$4,000,000 ∙ Community Development Financial Institutions Fund for Kent County’s African American Community ∙ Urban League of West Michigan

$1,000,000 ∙ A Place-Based Approach to Reducing Health Disparities in Kent County’s African American Community ∙ Grand Rapids Health Institute

$2,000,000 ∙ Live. Work. Thrive ∙ AYA Youth Collective

-This story has been corrected to show the Hispanic Center of West Michigan received $2 million for a Community, Economic and Workforce Development Through A Community Development Financial Institutions Fund

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