For a city with a lot of needs, Jamestown is having an awful lot of trouble spending the federal government’s $28 million American Rescue Plan Act gift.

The trouble continued earlier this week. City Council members had 16 resolutions on their agenda dealing with proposed ARPA programs, Twelve of those resolutions passed, though two were cut from $1 million to $500,000. Four of the proposals — using ARPA funds for branding and marketing commercial businesses, small businesses and the city and one directing $500,000 to the Jamestown Local Development Corp. for ARPA contracting services — were voted down by the council.

Mayor Eddie Sundquist and his administrative team have had a hard time getting on the same page with the City Council to get this federal money spent. That’s hard to believe given the process the city has used. There was an initial city proposal followed were public hearings led by the Chautauqua Region Community Foundation. Those hearings resulted in a separate set of suggestions from the CRCF summarizing the public’s wishes. ARPA funding has been a subject of countless City Council meetings, including a special meeting.

Through all that, roughly nine months after the initial American Rescue Plan Recovery Fund Master Plan was released Jamestown finds itself dickering over the best way to spend large sums of federal money.

That tells us two things are probably true, in our opinion. One, the federal program directed far too much money to local governments around the country if local governments are having this much trouble spending it.

Second, and most concerning to Jamestown residents, our community has no real solutions to the problems that have been staring us in the face for the past four decades. For years we have heard about programs that could work wonders here if only money was available. This is the first time in decades Jamestown hasn’t had to go begging or borrowing to implement a program — and we can’t get on the same page.

Jamestown will never have this opportunity again. And we’re on the verge of blowing it.