Coming out of an admittedly difficult budget season, which saw many cuts in funding in order to produce a balanced budget, the Lycoming County commissioners approved allocations for outside agencies at their meeting this week, with the caveat that there will be monitoring of the grants.

“We’re taking a different process, that I felt like we needed, to tighten up. We had some agencies that didn’t have grant monitoring agreements and some that did. This year everyone is going to be considered equal,” Mya Toon, director of financial management at the county explained.

“Everyone will have a grant monitoring agreement, which will allow commissioners to view the expenses, to evaluate the effectiveness of the funds being allocated to them,” she said.

“And at the same time, there’s a drawdown process…From a cash flow

perspective, we want to make sure we’re handing out the monies as they’re needed rather than giving them up front at a time that may not be beneficial to us from a cash flow perspective,” Toon said.

She added that the agencies will have to do an official drawdown request form which is incorporated in the grant monitoring agreement.

Both Commissioners Scott Metzger and Mark Mussina described the difficult decision-making that went into allocating the funds.

“It kinda goes back to the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds, when we had around $70 million worth of requests for $22 million worth of money. So the requests are always far exceeding what we actually are awarded. So again, difficult decisions,” Metzger said.

“We’ve talked to our lobbyists about whether they’re able to maybe find other money-state and federal monies-for some of these agencies. So they believe that some of them can, so they’re going to set up meetings with those entities and our lobbyists,” he said.

Toon noted that her office also does grants and by having grant monitoring agreements with the agencies, her department has a more “individualized perspective of what they’re spending the funds on can help assist me as well in looking for other grant sources for them,” she said.

The outside agencies receiving funds were: the Lycoming County Library System $1,000,000; Lycoming County Senior Citizens $10,000; Law Enforcement Association of Lycoming County $15,000; Lycoming Police Camp Cadet Foundation, Inc. $3,000; American Rescue Workers $5,000; Community Alliance for Progressive Positive Action $10,000; Firetree Place $25,000; Lycoming County Fire Police Association $3,000; West Branch Fireman’s Association $10,000; and the Williamsport Municipal Airport Authority $176,425.

Originally the amount requested by the outside agencies had totaled $4 million, but the amount was decreased by $395,825.

“We did a lot of due diligence to balance that budget, to make it fair for outside agencies, but also to taxpayers,” Toon said.