CARES Act funding addressed during Palmer City Council meeting

PALMER — Acting city of Palmer Manager Brad Hanson served his last day as Palmer’s manager on Friday and former Mat-Su Borough Manager John Moosey will take over on Monday as the new manager.

On Tuesday, Hanson provided an update on the economic impact of the decision by the Alaska State Fair to cancel the fair for 2020 along with other financial related matters, with some assistance from Moosey who called on his expertise as the borough manager.

Hanson said that on May 31 he was notified that the intergovernmental agreement for the Department of Public Safety Dispatch center’s move to the public safety building in Palmer that houses the Palmer Police Department and Alaska State Troopers has been put on hold.

“What was concluded by the governor is that he was going to slow the process down, form this taskforce for evaluation of potential alternatives. This taskforce is tasked with providing a report by the end of September or the idea is that they will go back to this other one,” said Hanson.

Palmer Mayor Edna DeVries said she had personally reached out to Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Dunleavy’s chief of staff, Ben Stevens, to ask for an appointment to the task force in one of the two slots for mayors in the Mat-Su Borough.

DeVries said that the task force was commissioned to determine whether DPS made the right decision to put the dispatch center in Palmer.

“I wanted very much for the state of Alaska to honor the agreement, the signed agreement that we have with them,” said DeVries.

The council had scheduled Information Memorandum 20-007 for a Committee of the Whole discussion regarding CARES Act funding.

The council suspended the rules to allow for Moosey to provide his input on the matter after participating in a zoom call with Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Dan Sullivan, who have two competing nonpartisan bills that would affect CARES act allocation.

“Both Senator Murkowski and Senator Sullivan were very positive, they thought this was going to move forward,” said Moosey. “Essentially SB 3062 pretty much says you can spend it on anything other than pension, past pension obligations and 3068 has some side boards and parameters on it but a whole lot more than we can do right now.”

Moosey said that the funding would address loss of revenue for municipalities and wipe out a deadline set for the end of the year.

“That’s going to balance on getting help for out community right now versus holding off a little bit, seeing the landscape that may have the money be more effective,” said Moosey.

The motion to postpone the CARES act Committee of the Whole discussion until the June 23 meeting as an informational memorandum passed unanimously. During Hanson’s manager’s report, he discussed the revenue projections and actual collections for recent months and discussed how staff projections of revenue dropoffs due to COVID-19 had been overestimated.

“Our May numbers are really April’s numbers which was for the most part a closed month and so you can see that overall sales for the month, sales tax revenue was down by 14 percent. So we had originally projected 30 percent in that cash flow numbers that we had done and so we redid those numbers so the cash flow projections for the rest of the year look significantly better,” said Hanson. “We normalized the rev projections for August and September with the loss of the state fair so basically we took out about $250,000 and or so and reduced that number by 12 percent so Gina [Davis] and I feel pretty good that those numbers are reflective on what’s happening right now.”