Officials from Bartholomew, Jackson and Jennings counties, plus Edinburgh, worked hard to come up with a list of projects under Indiana’s Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative — or READI — grant program. They were confident that the region would receive a large sum to kick-start some ambitious efforts outlined in the initiative.
The South Central Indiana READI team came up with a solid wish list of $49 million worth of potential projects. In December, Gov. Eric Holcomb announced the region would get $30 million to use on those projects.
That was the good news.
The bad news is, now, a lot of the regional projects that our local planners had submitted under the auspices of the READI project may not qualify under terms of the funding, because the state is using federal COVID relief money to fund these grants. The American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, restricts how that money can be used.
So far, The Republic’s Andy East reported, the biggest project in terms of cost has been ruled out for this round of READI projects. The plan sought $6.9 million to help construct the first phase of a long-dreamt 700-acre mobility test complex and proving ground at the former Walesboro airport for autonomous, electric and alternative fuel vehicles. Some of the area’s largest employers, including Cummins Inc. and Faurecia, hope to use a facility such as this for future research and expansion.
Additionally, questions remain about whether other projects, including $6 million for NexusPark — the repurposing of the former FairOaks Mall in Columbus — will qualify for funding under the terms of ARPA.
This has got to be confounding for community stakeholders who invested a great deal of time and effort to compile a comprehensive regional proposal guided by what the state asked for: economic development projects that could foster future growth and improvement in their region, particularly talent attraction and retention.
Jason Hester, president of the Greater Columbus (Indiana) Economic Development Corp., told East that committee members now are “spending just a lot of time to learn, ‘Well, what are those rules exactly, and how might our projects fit?’”
Did we mention that this is happening while the state of Indiana sits on a budget surplus projected to hit $5 billion by June? That’s enough to fund all of the state’s READI commitments 10 times over.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. But don’t blame our local officials, regional stakeholders and members of the public who participated in the READI process in good faith. They did as they were instructed. Now, they’re finding out late in the game that the rules they’d been told to operate under may not apply.
Part of the problem is the U.S. Treasury Department didn’t release its final rule on how ARPA money could be spent until a month after the READI grants had been awarded. And ARPA’s rules stress recovery from the pandemic over economic development. That raises questions about which READI projects will qualify for funding through ARPA and to what extent.
Boiled down, the ARPA and READI alphabet soup is a SNAFU of government bureaucracy that’s hard to swallow. Our regional leaders came together in good faith and followed the rules they were given. This needs fixed, PDQ and ASAP.
