Something very unpleasant is taking place in City Hall right now.

If you haven’t been paying attention, and I imagine many of you are busy and have not, the City was given $28 million in ARPA federal funding to spend. They have been doling it out over the past year. What is ARPA Funding? “The American Rescue Plan, signed into law on March 2021, provides $350 billion in funding for state and local governments to build an equitable economic recovery from the devastating economic effects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

I don’t agree with where the city has given much of the money. However, there is one program the City created I do very much support … the Senior Citizen Homeowners Program … Money to help Seniors with home repairs. Unfortunately, the program seems to have gone off the rails, because of a clerical error. The people that are going to suffer for this will be the seniors of our town. There was an inexcusable mistake with the numbers which suddenly has the program underfunded. The program was created to help Senior homeowners with repairs on their homes. The unusual thing about the ARPA money is that it could be used to help homeowners. It’s not a downtown grant. As we all know, homeowners have borne the brunt of the taxes in this city for many years. There is hardly ever this much money available to give to homeowners. Homeowners deserved more of this $28 million.

According to assessor, Lisa Volpe, who is heading the implementation of the Senior program “There were 302 applications for a total of $ 1,877,393.45 in requests. There have been 194 approvals to date and 45 denials. Currently, 63 remain unfunded. ”

Here is the problem. The Council was under the assumption, after asking many times, that the total cost to fully fund the program and include the 63 remaining Seniors would be $1.5 million and not $1.9 million. That is what they funded. $1.5 million. I watched some of these meetings, and I also was under the assumption that $1.5 million would fund the program fully, so I can see how the confusion came to be. That being said, it is inexcusable. These 63 seniors deserve to be funded by this program! Now these 63 seniors, or at least 50 of them, will not receive any of this money to help them even though they qualified for the program.

Who is to blame? It seems to me the confusion came from the director of the program and the mayor should have caught this mistake, but the bottom line is this program needs to be funded and the Council and the Mayor need to get their act together to fund it. The mayor wants to take the money from another housing program that would go to homeowners. I am very much against this. The council is blaming the Mayor and the Assessor, which I believe they are right in doing. Lisa Volpe wrote to me “I do believe the confusion was, I thought one thing and they thought another but we both thought the other was on the same page” I am very sorry, but this is not acceptable. This program was discussed at multiple meetings. Perhaps if there was a stronger Council President this might not have happened. Is he able to work with the mayor and council to make the senior program whole? I do believe everyone wants the seniors to have this money.

What is the solution? The Council, the Mayor, and the Director of Development have to find the money. They decided to vote $1.5 million of the funding to give to non-profits. They chose non-profits, over more to homeowners. I propose the amount given to non-profits be amended and the senior citizen program be fully funded.

Finally, If you are one of these 63 seniors, and you are reading this, I would suggest you fight like crazy to make sure you get this funding. Call the Mayor’s Office, Call Council Members, write letters to the newspaper, show up at meeting and let them know you are angry! You deserve this funding!

Tom Andolora is a Jamestown resident.