Is KC too small? City may not make the cut for coronavirus aid in stimulus bill
Kansas City may end up on the short end of the stick when Washington hands out billions of dollars in coronavirus relief during the coming weeks.
Why? The city may be too small.
The problem is embedded in the $2 trillion stimulus bill. It’s too late to fix now — Congress approved the bill, then left Washington for several weeks — but repairing the measure must be a top priority when lawmakers return to work.
The stimulus package sets aside $150 billion to help states and localities pay the costs of combating the virus. The money is divided among states by population, although no state gets less than $1.25 billion.
That’s what Kansas will get. Missouri should collect about $2.38 billion.
Some of that money is supposed to bypass statehouses and go directly to local governments. Crucially, though, only cities and counties with more than 500,000 residents appear to qualify for direct aid.
In 2018, an estimated 491,918 people lived in Kansas City. You can see the problem: Unless the city can quickly convince the feds it has added 8,100 people during the last couple years, direct disaster checks to City Hall won’t be possible.
In fact, no city in Missouri or Kansas meets the 500,000-resident threshold. “I’m extraordinarily concerned about that,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly told The Star Editorial Board on Friday. The high standard “just was not thoughtful.” She is, of course, absolutely right.
To be clear, counties can also apply for direct funds, and Jackson and Johnson Counties easily exceed 500,000 people. But counties have little incentive to use their federal grants to prop up city budgets, and in fact may be legally prevented from doing so.
Lawmakers in Jefferson City and Topeka who are facing their own fiscal challenges will likely be reluctant to use their federal dollars to help cities. As revenues plummet in the weeks ahead, every jurisdiction will be looking out for itself.
That would mean Kansas City taxpayers might have to shoulder City Hall’s COVID-19 disaster response expenses, while about three dozen cities with more than 500,000 people — Memphis, Nashville, Milwaukee to name a few — can get direct federal help.
“To leave (cities) out of direct receipt of funds due to a poorly-considered threshold harms the many homeless shelters, safety net clinics and services that cities like Kansas City host for our entire regions,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a statement.
“Requiring us now to work through state bureaucracies will slow down and hinder our ability to help the many organizations most in need,” he said.
Lucas isn’t the only mayor worried about this part of the rescue law. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has written House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking Congress to set the population threshold at 50,000. That seems eminently reasonable.
Giving aid directly to mid-sized cities and counties wouldn’t increase the price tag for the bill. Local aid would be subtracted from a state’s share of the fund.
No city or state should expect the federal government to bail them out completely. The coronavirus will eventually wreck the budgets of every city, county and state, and every taxpayer will have to pay a share of the expenses.
But the 500,000-resident threshold is “highly arbitrary,” as the Conference of Mayors put it. Kansas City is likely harmed by the standard, and Congress should address the problem when lawmakers get back to work.