Chicago Suburb Spent Entire Federal Covid-19 Relief Funding on Police Payroll
ciceroindependiente.com
ciceroindependiente.com
To me, this line in particular strongly suggests the journal was looking for dirt, not trying to report the truth.
Otherwise, the article really doesn't... like, seem to question its own premise at all?
Like, the idea is that police salaries were paid from the Covid relief fund? Does that imply that the police officers would not have been paid at all if the fund hadn't been there? That would be incredibly concerning if true, but the article doesn't mention it.
Or is the idea that police officers got paid large bonuses compared to previous year, and these bonus came straight from the fund? Again, that would be incredibly concerning, but the article doesn't shown any evidence of this.
-Was more money spent on police salaries than would have been if the Covid funding hadn't come through?
-What happened to the money that would have been spent on police salaries. What was it used for instead?
-Was the amount of money the city spent on its vaccination program smaller than the $1 million it received from the fund?
The town spokesman says "the money was also used to fund the entire operation of the town’s vaccination programs and is currently still funding it."
But the documents obtained by the reporter say that "Cicero used the CARES Act relief fund exclusively to pay officers’ wages". It was $1,074,912, which is about 6% of the $17 million yearly operating payroll costs for Cicero police officers. So less than a month's worth.
The article goes on to say "And the town’s vaccination efforts did not start until January 2021—one month after the money was supposed to have been spent, according to the funding application." To my recollection, no vaccinations were being offered to the general public before 2021, so what use would a "vaccination program" be until the vaccines were available? Maybe some planning and logistical prep, but no point renting event space and paying nurses and volunteers to stand around all day until the vaccines are ready to go.
Also, “Under Treasury Department guidelines, police payroll is an eligible expense for CARES relief as long as officers’ 'services are substantially dedicated to mitigating or responding to the COVID-19 public health emergency.'”
I had to jump all over the article to collect these facts in one place and get an overall picture of what happened, insofar as we know.
Obviously, I don't know the truth, and I'm not in a position to investigate the answers to my original questions above. I'm also not familiar with the mechanics of how money is actually moved around within municipal budgets, beyond some broad generalizations. But one scenario that fits all the facts without anybody lying goes like this:
-The city receives Covid relief funds that must be spent by Dec 2020.
-By that time, no vaccine is yet available, but the money is "in the bank" and is "constrained": it must be spent on qualifying expenses.
-Police officer payroll is a qualifying expense that can easily use up the entire relief fund of "constrained" funds.
-The relief money is spent on officer's salaries and the money that would have been used for that purpose is held in reserve until vaccines are available.
-That pool of reserved money is used to fund the vaccination effort in Cicero.
Now consider an alternative scenario, in which the officer's salaries were paid out of the normal budget and the relief money was held in reserve until the vaccination campaign began in earnest. Nobody would bat an eye at that, even though there's absolutely no functional difference between those two scenarios. And it sounds like they weren't allowed to hold the relief money itself in reserve because it had to be spent by December? Not clear what would happen to the money if they hadn't spent it yet.
Again, I have no idea if this is an accurate description of what happened. But it fits the facts presented and sounds plausible enough to me. And crucially, I have zero confidence that a newspaper reporter wouldn't milk an "incriminating" document like this for all it's worth. It is exhausting having to dig into every scandalous headline and see the reasonable explanations buried deep within the article, but that happens so frequently that I have no benefits of the doubt left to give.
The fact that, as far as I can tell, the crucial questions haven't been answered at least makes me suspect that there's nothing seriously nefarious going on here. After all, it's not like Cicero spent all the relief money on police bonuses and then just didn't have a vaccination campaign, right? They spent the money on "regular salary" for police officers, and then did ultimately spend the money on a vaccination effort.
Anybody with more expertise on municipal budgets and Covid relief want to chime in? Have I got this horribly wrong?