Johnson County Board of Supervisors expected to approve direct stimulus payments
Hunter
02/24/22
The Johnson County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote to approve direct stimulus payments to low to moderate income residents chosen randomly through a lottery system.
The five-member board is divided on the subject, with Supervisors Jon Green and Rod Sullivan favoring a revamped plan. Chair Royceann Porter, Pat Heiden, and Lisa Green-Douglass favor the original plan.
The county plans to earmark $3.5 million from American Rescue Plan Act funds given to the city of Iowa City and Johnson County to create a Direct Assistance Program. $1400 payments would be sent to those chosen through a lottery-style system.
About 2500 people would benefit from the payments, although the paper says there are thousands more who have been negatively-impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and will not get assistance. Community members have pushed the County to use all of their ARPA funds to provide payments to those who didn’t get stimulus checks, most often undocumented immigrants.
The Press-Citizen reports that Porter went on for about thirteen minutes expressing her frustration over the program and dialogue in the county that has taken place over the past several months. She said she doesn’t support prioritizing giving federal money to undocumented workers, because they might send the money abroad to family members.
The vote on the program was supposed to take place last week but delayed after Supervisor Jon Green received guidance from the US Treasury Department suggesting that the county would be allowed to create a program to target payments to excluded workers. Johnson County plans to distribute the funds across a wide spectrum of programs, including affordable housing, eviction prevention, infrastructure, and childcare.
Green’s correspondence reportedly accused his fellow Supervisors of playing politics, while Porter has accused Green of not coming to the office and fully communicating with the rest of the board.
Green and Sullivan support creating a fourth qualifier to the funding, targeting the program directly to excluded workers. The other three plan to vote yes on the program as is when they vote this morning.