For the second time in two weeks, one of Alamance County’s department heads has found herself in the hotseat over a grant application that, in other times, might’ve gotten a swift rubber stamp from the county’s governing board.
Last week, the county’s board of commissioners grilled Skye Sullivan of Alamance County’s family justice center about a proposed submission to the N.C. Crime Commission that had sought funds to provide victims’ services for local Latinos. The commissioners ultimately withheld their approval from this request after board member Ed Priola faulted certain aspects of the grant application such as its use of the gender neutral “Latinx” as a stand-in for the more traditional terms Latino and Latina.
On Monday, the board turned up the heat yet again – this time in regard to a grant application that Jamie Merchel, the county’s director of recreation and parks, planned to submit to her department’s state-level equivalent. In this case, however, the board’s concerns were limited to the grant’s financial implications. Nor did the commissioners allow the grant’s mandated 20 percent match to prevent them from bestowing their collective best wishes on Merchel’s request.
Much like the family justice center’s request, Merchel’s proposed application had apparently started out on the board’s so-called consent agenda – a collection of putatively routine or non-controversial items that the commissioners have customarily adopted en bloc without any individual discussion.
Last week, a request from commissioner Priola had compelled the commissioners to remove the family justice center’s grant application from their consent agenda. This week, Merchel’s proposal had already been placed on board’s regular agenda by the time that its members convened their latest regularly-scheduled meeting on Monday. John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, said that he had preemptively authorized this change after Priola suggested that the consent agenda should be stripped of any grant applications that would require matching funds from the county.
In any event, Merchel was ready to regale the commissioners that morning with a formal request for her department’s proposed application to the N.C. Division of Park and Recreation for funds to make Alamance County’s Cedarock Park more handicapped accessible.
Merchel told the commissioners that the impetus for this application came from a previous state level grant that has allowed department to develop a handicapped-friendly playground at Cedarock Park.
“What we have noticed in adding that wonderful playground is that we have to address some other connectivity issues,” the county’s recreation director went on to observe, “and one of the biggest is access to our restrooms from that playground.”
In order to surmount this obstacle, Merchel and her colleagues hope to develop a 2.8-mile walking track whose compact surfaces would be designed to accommodate wheelchairs and other mobility devices. This track would not only link the playground with the restrooms near the facility’s parking lot but it would also provide connections to the park office, and the historic farm on the park’s grounds. Also included in the scope of this project are handicapped upgrades at a fishing pier at the park.
Merchel said that she and her colleagues plan to ask the state’s division of recreation and parks for $310,232 to cover the cost of these proposed improvements. This grant would require a local match of 20 percent, or about $62,046 – $30,000 of which the nonprofit Impact Alamance has already pledged to contribute.
Merchel told the commissioners that her department will lean on Impact Alamance and other revenue sources in order to come up with the remainder of this mandated match. As an additional suggestion, commissioner Kelly Allen suggested that the rec department seek additional funds toward the match from the New Leaf Society – a nonprofit devoted to Alamance County’s beautification on whose board Allen currently serves. Merchel, for her part, said that if all else fails, she and her colleagues will include the unfunded remnant of the local match in their capital improvement request for consideration in the county’s next annual budget.
Merchel went on to assure the commissioners that this project shouldn’t saddle the county with any long-term financial obligations.
“The future maintenance costs that we expect from this project are very minimal,” she explained. “There is going to have a very minimal maintenance cost…This is all infrastructure – not programming. So there is not going to be any additional staffing or equipment cost.”
In the end, the commissioners were willing to give Merchel the go-ahead to pursue this state level grant. The prevailing mood of the board was perhaps best summed up by commissioner Pam Thompson.
“I think anything we can do to support our parts and recreation is a plus,” Thompson said before the board’s 5-to-0 decision. “It brings people to our county.”
Thompson’s assertion got no argument from John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, who admitted that he has been “temporarily” wheelchair bound for the past several weeks.
“Since I’ve been, for the last month, on wheels,” Paisley declared, “I’ve had sensibilities that support this cause.”
