Parts of the United States federal government ran out of funding at midnight Eastern on Dec. 22 after the White House and Congress failed to agree on spending priorities.
At more than three weeks without appropriations, the current partial shutdown is the longest period without a fully-funded federal government in the nation’s history, with no clear end in sight.
While the most direct effect of the shutdown on the Verde Valley comes in the closing of national monuments like Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle as well as the furloughing of U.S. Forest Service personnel, the shutdown has begun to have further indirect
repercussions for local governments and services that depend on federal grant money.
Near the beginning of the month, the Cottonwood city government sent out a notice to employees about how the shutdown would affect city administration. It highlighted that the Cottonwood Area Transit and Verde Lynx transit system are paid in part by a pass-through grant from the Arizona Department of Transportation, which is itself funded through federal appropriations for the Federal Transportation Administration.
“The shutdown has caused ADOT to reallocate their resources to other departments and not work on any federal transit grants,” the city government wrote in its notice to employees. “We are confident that we will get our reimbursements once the federal government shutdown is resolved. In the meantime, we are paying all transit services from our General Fund, including reimbursing Sedona for their transportation study.”
According to the notice, the full monthly costs in 2018 of running the CAT and Lynx transit system was $153,000, which the city must pay in totality until funding is restored.
According to Cottonwood Deputy City Manager Rudy Rodriguez, the FTA grant covers 50 percent of administrative costs and 85 percent of operational administrative costs, though he could not specifically determine how large the city expects the hole in funding due to the loss of these reimbursements to be.
The city’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget assesses the ADOT grant as funding $1,044,510 of the transit system’s $1,939,740 total annual spending. If that were paid out evenly to every month with a total monthly cost of $153,000, the city could be paying roughly $80,000 per month out-of-pocket as long as the shutdown lasts.
Rodriguez could not confirm these numbers by press time.
“There may have to be some reduction in the services as well as length of time between bus stops,” Rodriguez wrote in an email. “We will doing everything we can to ensure as much of the services are maintained as they currently are set up.”
Rodriguez expressed a hope that the city would be able to be more specific about the impact in the coming week after meeting with administrators to discuss.
Elsewhere in the Cottonwood municipal government, the Cottonwood Police Department has faced a budget hole for the salary of domestic violence Victim Advocate Johannah Rutschow, who was hired with a federal grant.
However, the department has expressed a commitment to ensure that Rutschow will be paid as normal for the duration of the shutdown, no matter how long it lasts.
“Johanna serves in an invaluable position enabling Cottonwood PD to provide the highest level of service to victims that simply wouldn’t be possible without her talent and dedication,” CPD Chief Steve Gesell wrote in an email. “In a protracted delay in grant reimbursement we would leverage salary savings to fill the delta until the grant funds were released.”
Also in the field of domestic violence, the Verde Valley Sanctuary faces what could be a serious funding lapse due to the shutdown.
The domestic and sexual violence shelter gets reimbursed monthly for a portion of its services from the U.S. Department of Justice through the Victims of Crime Act. With DOJ funding not appropriated, the last month that the VVS will be able to have reimbursed is December.
“It’s not yet in the hole, but we will be in the hole soon, at the end of this month,” VVS Executive Director Matthew Kelley said. According to Kelley, the sanctuary usually bills the federal government around $51,000 per month for shelter, legal and outreach programs.
“We have an emergency reserve of three months at our full operations tucked away in savings,” Kelley said.
“We’ve done this for some years. Most shelters or services that do emergency services like we do should have emergency reserves. We can only use it in the case of emergency and board approval, and this is exactly what it’s designed for.”
The Yavapai-Apache Nation has also seen “some minor effects on some departments” due to lack of federal appropriations, according to Chairwoman Jane Russell-Winiecki.
Russel Winiecki did not respond to questions about what those specific minor effects were.
“The Nation continues to operate without any serious shutdowns on its own,” Winiecki wrote. “We prepared to move into 2019 as we always do and therefore will not be adversely affected by this partial government shutdown.”
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551, or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
