‘Incredibly frustrating’: St. Louis gets $32 million in COVID-19 aid; KC gets nothing
Kansas City’s month-long effort to get federal cash to fight the COVID-19 pandemic has taken another bizarre, unfortunate turn.
This week, a Missouri committee agreed to hand out $521 million from the federal stimulus bill to help counties with their coronavirus expenses.
Clay County will get $29.3 million. Platte County will receive $12.2 million. The city of St. Louis is getting $32.2 million.
Wait — St. Louis? Kansas City didn’t get a dime from the fund. Neither did Columbia, or Springfield, or Lee’s Summit, or any other Missouri city. Why did St. Louis get that much federal aid?
On a technicality, as it turns out. St. Louis has a strange hybrid government, a half-city, half-county concoction set up by the state and local citizens. St. Louis is a city when it wants to be and a county when it wants to be.
And right now, being a county means St. Louis can collect a $32 million handout without much fuss. Every other Missouri city has to beg their counties for cash, which they are doing with varying degrees of success.
St. Louis County, outside of the city, gets its own $173.5 million grant.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” said Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. Instead of working on reopening the city, or keeping an eye on city policy, the mayor has found himself wrestling with four counties, two U.S. senators, a governor, a congressman or two and state bureaucrats to claim funds for Kansas City’s COVID-19 expenses.
It’s serious money (“damn right it is,” Lucas said this week.) Kansas City thinks it’s owed at least $88 million from the stimulus bill, money it needs to pay EMT overtime, health department costs and other expenses.
Officials in Clay, Platte and Cass counties have generally been sympathetic, the mayor says. But he also thinks Jackson County, which got its stimulus money directly from Washington, should give Kansas City roughly half of its allotment, or $60 million.
So far, Jackson County is less than enthralled with that idea. “We’re trying to have a conversation about that,” Lucas said Wednesday.
State officials have offered vague promises of help. Missouri Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick “is working with the counties on a solution to allow the city of Kansas City to have access to funds as soon as possible,” his office said in a statement.
Maybe our state senators can work on the problem. Oops. Kansas Citians south of the Missouri River don’t have any state senators.
The absurdity of this bureaucratic nonsense is plain for all to see. Kansas City doesn’t qualify for direct federal aid because it’s a few thousand people short of the 500,000 population cutoff. It doesn’t qualify for direct state help because it’s a city, not a county — or a weird tossed salad like the city of St. Louis, which has but 300,000 residents.
Instead, when the focus should be on people, not politics, Kansas City officials are bouncing from courthouse to courthouse with their hats in their hands.
“I believe that the next stimulus will make corrections,” U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said in a statement. Let’s hope that’s the case.
Let’s also hope that Jackson County understands its responsibility to share revenue with the biggest city, by far, in Missouri. Half of the county’s $123 million grant sounds about right.
No one objects to funding coronavirus costs in St. Louis, which has been hit hard by the disease, or offsetting the costs in any other city or county in Missouri. But there’s no legitimate reason Kansas City should have to rely on political charity to pay its expenses, either.