Feeding Laramie Valley, County resolve ARPA funding discrepancies
The money has been reallocated to cover expenses made during the appropriate window of time. And receipts for some $44,000 of expenses — once believed lost — were located and compiled.
The local nonprofit Feeding Laramie Valley and the county government’s grants office have resolved issues related to the nonprofit’s use of federal funding.
A self-contradictory original contract and disorganized reporting earned the nonprofit a notice of default from the county grants office and garnered talk of legal action or other consequences during an Albany County Commission meeting last month.
But those issues have been hammered out in a revised budget and revised reports, requested by the county and submitted by Feeding Laramie Valley.
“All of the things we asked them to do have been done. So we have no further outstanding issues,” Deputy County Attorney Jennifer Curran told commissioners Tuesday. “At this point, the grants office is satisfied that everything has been taken care of.”
Feeding Laramie Valley is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on food security and food justice. It is perhaps best known for two programs with wide impacts across the community:
The SHARES Program, which provides some 500 people annually with free, locally-sourced produce and recipes — including 85 families who have that food delivered to their home.
The Kids Out to Lunch Program, which provides free lunch and activities for children throughout the summer.
Last year, the organization requested $102,000 from the county’s pool of ARPA funding. That money was meant to reimburse food and other purchases made by the nonprofit in the pursuit of its goals.
And indeed, that is what the money was spent on. The nonprofit used their funding to reimburse purchases it made to either feed Laramie residents or strive for a more resilient and just food system.
“It was still all spent on food,” Action Resources Director Gayle Woodsum told the Laramie Reporter last month. “We purchased food, just as our proposal stated. We paid for food that had been purchased and given for no charge to hundreds of people in Albany County.”
Stakes
In one meeting last year, the commissioners awarded $440,000 to government agencies and nonprofits like Feeding Laramie Valley to weather various hardships brought on by the pandemic. The Laramie Soup Kitchen, for example, received almost $70,000 to cover the increased need it saw during a time of skyrocketing inflation.
But when Feeding Laramie Valley submitted its receipts for some of the $102,000 it had received from the county, the grants office noticed some problems.
Specifically, some of the money was spent outside of the allowable time frame and receipts for some $44,000 in expenses were missing.
It was clear from the beginning that this was not a case of nefarious activity, but rather one of confusion surrounding the original contract and of “messy” reporting.
But the county desperately needed to sort out the situation. That $102,000 came from the county’s pool of federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, and the county was staring down a rapidly approaching deadline for reporting to the feds how that ARPA money was spent.
Without accurate information from Feeding Laramie Valley, the county would be unable to report accurate information to the federal government — a scenario that would harm Albany County’s federal grant status and hinder the county’s very ability to access federal grants in the future. To avoid that outcome, the county would have been willing to sue the nonprofit for the return of that ARPA funding.
All of this was teed up and hanging over the community when County Grants Manager Bailey Quick and Deputy County Attorney Jennifer Curran updated the commissioners in early March.
“We need to get this done or we’ll have to move to the next step, which is taking our money back,” Commission Chair Pete Gosar said at the time.
But a lawsuit would ultimately prove unnecessary.
Resolution
There were two core problems with Feeding Laramie Valley’s initial reporting: money was spent outside of the allowable time frame and the receipts provided were either incomplete or disorganized.
On the issue of the allowable time frame, the relevant mistake appears to have been made in the very beginning — before either Feeding Laramie Valley or the county even signed the contract for $102,000. The official rules — for the federal funding itself — only let nonprofits cover expenses made during or after March 2021. Feeding Laramie Valley used it to cover expenses made as far back as April 2020. But the contract included both dates. The official language outlined the later March 2021 date, while the nonprofit’s proposal — a document included in the contract itself outlining how the nonprofit intends to use the funding — quoted the April 2020 date.
This discrepancy was missed by all parties who signed the contract.
“There were conflicting dates that were part of the complete contract,” Woodsum said in a statement offered during the commission meeting Tuesday. “The contract was signed by the county, it was fully executed by the county, and it was signed by Action Resources, so there were a lot of people who missed that there were conflicting dates.”
To resolve this issue, Feeding Laramie Valley worked with the county to reallocate the money to reimburse purchases made only during the officially allowable time frame and updated their initial project proposal to reflect the change.
The revised documents themselves were emailed to commissioners ahead of the Tuesday meeting and not included in the publicly available agenda. So it’s not clear yet whether Feeding Laramie Valley was able to reallocate (and keep) the whole $102,000 — or if they were unable to reallocate all of it to within the appropriate time frame, in which case, they would have to return the remainder.
On the issue of the allegedly missing receipts, they might not have been missing at all and were, rather, submitted in such a way that they could not be easily located.
Curran told commissioners last month that an email from Woodsum to the grants manager had some receipts attached.
“ … and there was also, at the very bottom of it, a link to a Dropbox folder that had additional receipts,” Curran said. “We missed that on our end.”
But she added the link was broken and — after acquiring a new link from Feeding Laramie Valley — the receipts within were disorganized, cut off or duplicated in inappropriate ways.
“There were some receipts that were in multiple folders, but they were only used in one,” she said, by way of example.
Quick added that it was time-consuming to work through and sort out the receipts provided. One employee worked for at least six hours to go through the initial report.
“They’re messy,” Quick told the commissioners. “Every other nonprofit we get receipts from, it’s laid out right there, organized. So it’s frustrating, I’m not going to lie. But we’re trying to work with them.”
During the commission meeting Tuesday, Curran was able to provide an update. She told commissioners that county staff had worked through all the receipts and now felt everything was accounted for. And Woodsum said she now has a clearer understanding of the receipt submissions the county grants office is looking for.
“We’ve now also learned a better way of communicating what they’re looking at when the grants management office receives our reports that they can more easily check instead of having to go through every single receipt,” she said.
The commissioners approved the revised budget and reports with a 2-0 vote. (Commissioner Terri Jones was absent from Tuesday’s meeting.)
Fallout
In addition to pointing out the mistakes made by all parties and expressing an interest in continued good relations with the county, Woodsum added she was frustrated by public reporting on the issue.
“There have been ramifications for Action Resources, not because of misunderstanding and confusion that occurred between our organization and your official county standing, but because of how information about that was spread in a public kind of way,” she said. “The way it was reported is that it appeared that we were inappropriately using funds or misallocating funds — things that people hear in the world that sound very startling. It was a mistake that we all made that was relatively easily and legally remedied.”
Woodsum specifically said she was frustrated that her perspective was not included in the first story about the reporting discrepancies and that reporting on the issue more generally could cause people to trust Feeding Laramie Valley less.
“There are people who now, from reading poorly represented public reporting, think that there’s something to be concerned about in terms of how we handle our funds — which is not true,” Woodsum said. “I hope the takeaway is not that Feeding Laramie Valley or Action Resources made big errors and now we fixed them. We made some errors and so did the county and we all got together and we fixed them. And we’re all going to move forward and do better the next time around.”
Gosar acknowledged the mistake he had made in missing the original contract’s contradictory dates. He said he would be more “cognizant” of those in the future, and added:
“It was the intention of this board to invest in the community and this entity that really does make a difference in people’s lives. I don’t want that to be lost in all of this.”
But he added the matter of missing or messy receipts was indeed a very serious one because of the potential countywide ramifications. Gosar thanked the grants office for the overtime they worked to sort out the issue.
“Because so much of county services come from federal funding and we just really can’t jeopardize that,” Gosar said. “And so I do appreciate the grants office being very diligent about that. It is something we have to do. One day maybe we’ll be flush enough that we don’t have to do it, but that day isn’t here yet so federal funding is important to us.”
Not a fan of FLV for multiple reasons. To start, they can find a less disparaging name.