We'll go ahead and get started. Thank you everyone for joining us today. And this is a series of trainings every Thursday. Starting last week through the end of the year. Launched provided by the co hosted with the Alaska Municipal League and Alaska Federation of Natives. And today we have Chris sloty, who's a Partner with a law firm Schwabe Williamson and we are excited to have him talk to us today about upcoming funding opportunities. Just a quick little housekeeping if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat, or raise your hands. We will try to answer them as they come in or we depending on, save them to the end and to have a q&a session at the end. But with that I will turn it over to Chris and Chris if you want to introduce yourself and also share your screen. Let's keep going.
Thank you very much, Sara, I appreciate that. Um, so it says, introduce me I'm Chris Lottie, I'm an attorney with the law firm of Schwabe Williamson and Wyatt. We'll quick background I've been practicing Alaska for about 20 years, and previously served as a general counsel inside how inside counsel for old harbor Native Corporation, before coming back out to the private practice. I think I've talked with some of you already about some Cares Act issue and certainly I've worked with a variety of agencies on Cares Act funds, and also some tribes on ARPA funds. Today we're going to be focusing on some other grant opportunities available through to Native American Native to its right to Alaska Indian tribes and Alaska Native corporations and their tribe and some tribal organizations, but I'm gonna have a PowerPoint presentation, but first before I go through the PowerPoint I did want to make sure and I'm sure everybody here it is, but I did want to make sure everybody was aware of this excellent website. I believe it's being maintained by the Municipal League. The Alaska arco website, which someone can confirm that you can see that on my screen. Okay, okay great thank you so this is a great resource for kind of trying to reviewing some funding opportunities and what's really nice about it is that when you're, you know you're pulling up the actual grant programs. It has kind of a one stop shop for all the specific regulatory language the notices of funding opportunities kind of all the specifics that you'll need to know to actually submit an application. So, this is Alaska. Alaska aarp.org I think it's a good website to go ahead and bookmark and continuing to kind of check back in on. So now I'm going to share my PowerPoint here and go through it. So again this is the funding resources which is the really good one as I just said is the last arpa.org. It's also frankly just going kind of Google's a good resource where you just start searching for ARPA, and whatever grant program or whatever error you're trying to address or COVID and grant programs and the error you're trying to address. While the federal government certainly can do better in terms of getting the information out there. Google is a pretty good search engine and you can certainly get some access to the individual agency websites which generally are. Once you identify the specific program you're looking at generally are pretty good at providing information about it. One thing I didn't want to start off with was talking kind of generally about kind of the strategic approach to funding opportunities and this is, I think, was prevalent right now immediately prevalent right now is in this kind of the potential coordination between agencies, the Alaska Native corporations Cares Act funds and tribal cares are clones, and then the ARPA funds that have been received by tribes or other grants that are available to tribes, and other nonprofits. So as everybody probably knows that the Cares Act funds that the agencies and the tribes received have, you know, it's a pretty relatively narrow scope of view so to speak necessary expenditures related to COVID and most critically. The money has to be spent and whenever you're spending it on the service or the product needs to be put in a service before the end of this year end of 2021, which, you know that poses certain limitations on what you could do so because of the difficulty for agencies when they had a very short period of time, you know, August to the end of the year, to actually deploy these funds, and some of the most impactful use of the funds could be on like housing assistance for homeless medical facilities type of improvements, etc. But in today's economic climate with the kind of supply chain issues the lack of manpower, you know, it may just not be, kind of, economically, or frankly just possible, as a practical matter, to build something by the end of the year to buy something, have it deployed by the engineer using cares.
But ARPA funds have a very different timeline, and also a very much broader scope of use. So for ARPA funds, like for example in the housing area tribes can use ARPA funds to provide for housing, housing programs that would not be available to you to pay to fund using cares like funds, and also arco funds have much longer runway for use you can use them up through 2026. And so, because you're looking at these different granting grant opportunities that we're looking to look at today, and Aqua phones of cares like funds. When you're kind of doing this, look at it as strategic. Strategic approach if there's a project that you think you could deploy this year. That might be a project that you focus on trying to use cares that funds are located cares like funds to fund, because those funds need to be used this year as opposed as opposed to using for example ARPA funds for that project, because if you use Cares Act funds for that project that frees up your ARPA funds to use for different projects that maybe have a longer runway or require more time to implement. So my main goal and a goal these first couple slides is just to kind of have, people keep that in the back of your mind that you can be strategic about it. Or for example let's say that you, you want to provide for affordable housing or shelters. Well, you know, that might be a gray area for the use of Cares Act funds, but it's not for ARPA funds. So you could use ARPA funds to pay me by the facility that you're going to have the housing in, but then use cares like funds to furnish it or cares like funds to furnish it in a way that makes it kind of COVID-19 friendly in terms of providing for social distancing and other COVID-19 prevention measures, so you can kind of combine the funds, use the for different purposes but for the same overall project. So, the first project we're gonna talk about is the capital project funds project fund which was announced by Treasury and the goal of the capital projects fund is generally to help communities have access to high quality modern infrastructure and clean broadband needed to access critical services about $100 million has been set aside for tribal governments and the way the Treasury has established it is essentially a kind of a grant amount that is capped at 167,504 $504 eligible recipients are federally recognized tribal governments that does not include Alaska Native corporations but does include federally recognized Alaska tribes. What are the eligible uses well one you could use it to get grant funds to start to build out your broadband infrastructure, subject to the requirement that the whatever you potentially can construct has to provide a minimum of 100 megabytes per second upload a 20 megabytes per second download. The next kind of broad category in which you could use the funds for our four did what they called digital connectivity technology, which is essentially buying laptops, tablets, personal computers that you could either put in a public facility for use by the public, or loan to members of the public, like for example students for use through either short or long term loans, you're not, no as I read it, you're not allowed to just give them the computer free and clear it's more, it should be a loan in that like for example students, you give them a maybe a Google Chromebook that they can use for the school year then they return it in at the end of the school year, but you could use funds to buy those Chromebooks buy those personal Peters and distribute them in that matter. To the extent that you have facilities to provide public Wi Fi, you could use the grant funds to build out that public Wi Fi to either, you know created or to expand its scope or its or its efficiency. The kind of more broader stroke is as they describe it generally is projects to construct or approve buildings that are designed to jointly and directly enable work, education and health monitoring. That seems a little kind of convoluted but really what what the what they're trying to do is provide grant funds to kind of, to be able to use for what I would view as multi purpose facilities facilities that are not just for work not just for education and not just for health monitoring, but could be used kind of generally for all of them for all three categories. And so some of the examples are, you know, a full service community school that provides academic programs to students and Adult Education in the community at large libraries that provide public access to the internet for a work, education and health monitoring, community health centers that administer providing health care, also provide a broader range of services to the communities they serve. So as you can see it's a pretty broad definition, although they do want to try to kind of be able to check the box on, you're going to provide assistance to folks who need to work. We need to get education and need help, and have healthy needs.
So we had a question here can help can these funds be used for health related roads such as needs such as roads to the dump. I think that's probably that may fall under the constructor improve the community, the committee to help get health center, but I would tend to think not. Now, the way that Treasury has established this application process is when you submit your application, there's kind of a kind of separate boxes you can check that are kind of pre approved uses, but for for things that don't clearly fall within one of the pre approved kind of grant programs, you can put in your, your explanation of what you want it to use for and Treasury will review it on a case by case basis and tell you yes or no. So for this one if you wanted to get the grant to try to use it for roads to maybe not necessarily to dump but to a maybe a community facility to prevent more access to facility. I certainly would suggest recommend go ahead and try to apply the worst thing, Treasury could do is say no we can't give you the grant for that. In reading that question again if it's just a road from the proving the road to a to a kind of a landfill right up. I don't think that specific use would be permissible because that, that facility, the landfill is not a facility that is providing, you know, enabling work, education and health monitoring or it's not a building in which those three activities are done. So applications have opened as of October 1 2021 The deadline for applications is June 120 22 and the deadline to use the funds is December 31 2026 So you do have a broad, you know, kind of a longer runway to actually use the funds. Granted, given that the grant amounts are capped at 167,000 You probably won't need that full amount of time to use it but it does permit you to kind of have, you don't have to rush you're kind of procurement strategies in terms of trying to buy your computer equipment or buy your Wi Fi equipment and get it deployed. Here are some links to the kind of the program description and the, the guidance so that Treasury has a broad description of the fund. It has a very kind of detailed guidance as to the permissible uses and how you structure your application, and they provide a helpful application checklist that you can follow when you're submitting your online application. And Sarah, my understanding is you'll make this presentation available to folks so they could be able to cut and paste these links as appropriate.
Yes, correct. Okay, great.
So any kind of specific questions about the capital projects fund. Before I go on to the next.
Okay, so the next one is the local assistance and tribal consistency fund. This is a pretty broad program where they're essentially $2 billion was to be made available for make payments, as they say, to make payments under Section Two eligible revenue sharing counties and eligible tribal governments. So for, for, that that includes both state and the kind of local communities and tribal governments that fold 2 billion. They have set aside $250 million to support federally federally recognized tribes, and it was undetermined the amount of the grant will be two tribes, because Treasury at this point it just said it will determine the funding formula based on the economic conditions of counties and tribes, it has not been specific as to what that formula is going to look like for tribal entities for the county so like the local governments, Treasury has said they're going to consider poverty rates household income land values, and unemployment rates as well as other economic indicators over the 20 year period ending with September 30 2021 we could assume some relatively similar kind of factors are going to apply to its determination of how it's going to distribute of $250 million between the tribes, but we don't know what that specific amount, what that specific calculation is going to look like, or what the ultimate end amount will be on eligible recipients for this, this portion of this is federally recognized tribes, Alaska Native corporations would not fall within this definition.
And this is an extremely this is essentially just kind of money to the tribe to be able to use as you see fit. In terms of eligible uses, they have broadly stated is that it is that money can be used for any governmental purpose other than a lobbying activity. So to the extent you receive these funds, you can basically just put them in your general account and use them as you see fit, other than for lobbying.
There's no real kind of opening of applications or deadline for applications or deadline for use of the funds at least at this point, we're going to want to keep monitoring treasury and see how they would actually kind of, when they, the next steps they take to try to determine its allocation and may be something similar to the Cares Act where tribes had to submit specific information about their, their, their population their geographic location and their expenditures. So that Treasury could then use that information to calculate the kind of distribution of the funds, but we have not seen a specifically request for that information yet. We will be keeping, trying to keep track of that and letting you know if and when we can see that.
And here, so the program description, there isn't really much of a program description. It's, There's a little bit information on the Treasury website and then there's the actual statute which I have here on the screen, but again this is a pretty, they've not rolled out very much detail about this program.
I guess we see a question about advocacy. I think that if we're talking about the local assistance and tribal consistency fund. I think it depends on what do you mean by advocacy. They say, can't you not cannot use it for lobbying activities which is typically meant you're hiring somebody to go talk to your congressman or congressperson, or Senator etc. Or a federal agency I think for those types of issues, you probably could not use the funds for general kind of advocacy for, you know, for the native people or for your tribe in general, kind of, as long as it doesn't fall within that definition on lobbying I think that probably would be permissible. Another question we had about the capital funds. The, the prior is sorry the capital projects fund. Can the capital funds be used to purchase heavy equipment to keep a road clear to help people get to clinics and metabank plants. Again, I don't think it can be. Because what they want you to use those those funds are on kind of community facilities that that where people can use them for, for work for education or for health monitoring. So I think, as opposed to kind of health care needs. It's more of what type of facility and what type of facility I could use these funds on to make it more available or better able to be used by people to, you know, use your computers or other technology in the facility for work education or health, health care purposes.
Okay, so the next grant program we're going to be turning to is the additional assistance formula grants for rural areas and Tribal Transit program. So essentially these are funds that are attended to us, to assist entities who are operating transit systems, who have demonstrated they need additional assistance because of operating expenses related to day to day operations cleaning centers sensitization combating the spread of pathogens, ie COVID and maintaining critical staffing levels. For this point 2.2 billion have been set aside for these types of grants, no minimum or maximum grant grant amount is specified. So it's an application process and then they would, they will grant you the amount that they feel that your application is justifies in terms of eligible recipients, it's recipients of urbanized area formula funds or rural area formula funds, was a result of COVID-19 require additional assistance. So essentially, brain and for any tribes, it really kind of depends on, have you, are you an eligible recipient of urbanized area formula funds or rural area formula funds. These are transit, these are funds provided by the Department of Transportation to again assist with kind of transportation projects or kind of a community, community transportation projects like buses and and whatnot in Alaska subways, etc, those types of projects. The rural area formula funds provide capital planning and operating assistance to federally recognized tribes is for public transportation in rural areas with populations of less than $50,000 so to the extent that any of our Alaska native tribes are eligible for this, that would they would be eligible for the rural area formula funds. Now you may also be in a situation where you have not actually applied for these fuel, you're not receiving currently receiving rural area formula funds, but it's something you may want to consider is this something that you can apply for, to be able to subsidize and support public transportation in your area.
In terms of the eligible uses if you're able to receive a grant, it's very broad it's essentially you can use it for all your operating expenses, which include personnel cleaning and sanitization preventative maintenance driver salaries fuel equipment with less with useful life of less than a year. Our debt service, service payments incurred to maintain operations and avoid layoffs and furloughs, really what you're not supposed to but really the only things you cannot use it for are kind of long term capital and capital projects. So equipment that we would use for more than a year so you can't use to go buy a bus for example or build a facility, but you can use it for all your operating expenses. Those applications opened on September 1 2021 For this one, there is a relatively, there is a very actually very short deadline of November, 8 2021. So if you do, if you are operating kind of a public transportation project or community transportation efforts. This is something you may want to consider and if you do want to address it, you probably something to investigate sooner than later. Just because there's this very quick deadline coming up
is a question with this cover fairies and harbors. I think that it would as long as you're already receiving those rural those rural funds. So if and if you're not receiving those rural funds you'd first need to investigate. Can you use those world funds, okay are you eligible to become kind of a recipient of those world funds to help help subsidize your berries at harvest. Once you get those which are kind of within the program, which are within the what you're receiving rural area formula funds, then yes and you could apply for this grant and use those grants for kind of operating expenses of those types of community public transportation.
Next grant opportunity we're going to get away address is this what they call a 2021 Continuum of Care competition and non competitive award of youth homeless demonstration program. The purpose of this program is to try to provide funds to essentially to permit tribes tribally designated housing entities to quickly rehouse homeless individuals, families, persons fleeing domestic violence, and the youth, while minimizing the trauma and dislocation caused by homelessness. Essentially, it's a, it's a program to try to provide funds to address both homeless homelessness itself and also the consequences and impacts of homelessness $2.656 billion have been set aside for it, of that of that $2.6 billion 77 million is available for renewal and replacement grants, essentially, if you already had a grant under the same program and from prior years, they've set aside 77 million to kind of renew those grants, and they've also set aside $102 million for domestic violence but they call domestic violence bonus projects that are kind of tailored and specific to domestic violence issues to addressing domestic violence users. There is no minimum or maximum grant award amount instead at HUD is going to, this is sorry this is organized by or operated by the Housing and Urban Development, HUD will what kind of will receive all the applications, it will score them based on specific kind of point scoring system that's included in the notice that's described in the notice of federal funding opportunity, and then it will rank all the different projects and allocate the grant amounts based on that ranking for eligible recipients of interest to this call, Indian tribes or tribal designated housing entities are eligible to submit applications. We had a question Can cities and tribes cooperatively apply for these funds. In general I think that's generally going to be the case for almost all these grant opportunities, most of them talk about how you can have kind of consortiums as long as the, all the members of the consortium are eligible innum themselves, but it will be kind of specific to particular grant opportunities, some, some will permit you to have a consortium in which there's, for example someone as I'll get to an element in their, in our, in a subsequent kind of grant opportunity. You can have a consortium of rural and urban entities, as long as the rural entities, kind of have a majority of the consortium, but most of them say yes if you're, if you're if your consortium is comprised of eligible individuals that should be eligible to apply. What is the purpose of these grants, as I said before, it's to quickly rehouse homeless individuals families persons fleeing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking and youth while minimizing the trauma and dislocation caused by homelessness. It's also intended to kind of permit you to establish programs to mainstream, to, to promote access to an effective utilization of mainstream programs by homelessness, homeless individuals and families, essentially setting up programs that would permit individuals who are families who are homeless, from accessing the same programs and resources that those who are not homeless would have access to, to a large degree, those types of programs will be similar to a navigator program such as AFM is putting on, which is having people go out to work with homeless individuals and families, and have putting them in connection with those grant opportunities, those benefits those public benefits and other resources that they may not be aware of. Abroad broad scope on the grant in this grant and its opportunity it's a very broad scope of reducing homelessness its impacts and so if you have kind of an innovative project or you have something that kind of touches on homelessness, it probably would be ultimately eligible for a grant, although of course, the more focused you are on, on your project is on reducing homelessness, the higher your score from HUD will probably be and more likelihood that as that you'll receive funds and also more likely that you'll get a larger amount of funds. HUD has established some priorities and it's going to look at when reviewing applications. They include any ending homelessness for all persons so they want to make sure that it's a broad scope rather than a narrowly targeted scope, they want to they want you to adopt or they're going to prioritize projects that adopt a housing first approach and what they mean by this is an approach that is focused on getting people into permanent housing, rather than just kind of temporary stopgap measures. They don't want to have a probe, they'll favor programs that are structured so that that is focused on again providing permanent housing versus providing temporary housing where someone goes from one one shelter to another shelter to another shelter. They're going to prioritize programs that focus on reducing unsheltered homelessness. So, targeting those individuals who are not already in shelters, but are truly completely have no shelter and need either get into a home and apartment or some type of shelter.
They want to see how your program is going to improve system performance of existing partners, to the extent that you're able to partner with housing, health and service agencies, that's going to be an important, add to your application and I will give it a couple more points under their point system. They want to see how your program will address racial equality in the sense that it will provide. It will ensure that those homeless and homeless individuals who are receiving or not receiving the services that they should because of their because of racial or because of their race, how you focus on that ensuring that to prevent that from happening and ensuring racial equality. And then finally, when you're submitting, when you're preparing your application and you're identifying who's going to serve on kind of the project team, to the extent that you can include persons with what they call learned experience in the planning process you will get extra points for that so to speak, you'll get high ranked higher, and what they mean. That is, they feel that there's a lot of benefit from someone who has gone through a period of homelessness, who is now working with you on the planning process so they can bring as they say that learned experience that kind of personal knowledge of the impacts of homelessness, and the best practices or the best ways to address homelessness to bear so they want to have involve those people have that learned experience, they want you to involve those people that have those learned experience in your planning and implementation process. These applications opened opened on September, 1 2021, and the deadline is November 16 2021 So this is another application deadline that is coming up quickly, and that if you feel that you're, you know, this isn't these types of funds or ones that you're going to seek to acquire, this is something you should look at right away. Just because, as it is a scoring application, you know, scoring method of ranking the applications is not simply, it's not enough just to submit an application and you'll get some funds, you're in basically in competition with others so you want to put your best foot forward. In terms of the structure and content of your application.
And here are the program descriptions again through their HUD. They're very pretty comprehensive program description on their website and they have a very good guidance as well.
So,
the economic development agency of the federal government has also developed a travel tourism and outdoor recreation program grant program. This is established kind of two different types of grants their state tourism grants about $510 million was allocated to them, and that's going to states to help them invest in marketing infrastructure for to rejuvenate as they say safe leisure business and international travel. But they also have a competitive grant program, which they've set aside $240 million to help those communities have been impacted by COVID-19. In terms of the travel tourism, etc. And the said. The purpose of these grants ours are to help those communities, invest in infrastructure workforce, and other projects to support the recovery of the tourism industry, and as I say the political, economic resilience of the community in the future. The grant amounts are set aside, they're between $10,000 These are the competitive grants, between $10,000 up to $100,000 So $10,000 minimum $100,000 maximum and eligible recipients includes Indian tribes or consortiums of Indian tribes.
The purpose of the grants is to help those communities in this case it would be, in our case it'd be the tribal entities to implement as they say, sustainable economic recovery strategies through a variety of non construction, construction, and construction projects to respond to the damage to the travel tourism and outdoor recreation sectors from COVID-19 types of projects that you could use it on would be water and stormwater wastewater improvements, pure construction improvements, new outdoor recreation and trail infrastructure and public access enhancements nature based infrastructure projects to improve access to recreation, culture, arts and tourism facilities, workforce training facilities, accessibility enhancements and country wide or multi state travel tourism or outdoor recreation promotion, but this one is a pretty broadly based and that mean at most a lot of Alaska tribal entities are located in communities that, You know, maybe it's a place where people come to sport fish, or they come to hunt or they come to sightsee right there. There's a tourism component to it. And as you can see, you can build things that have a tourism component but also provide a lot of additional ancillary benefit to just the community, particularly if for example pure construction and improvements. Maybe you have a construction project or an improvement to your pier, then yes, now you maybe you get more tourism visitors and word sport fishers be able to come, but your community also want to use that for other purposes, similar for trail infrastructure and public access enhancements to the extent that you can structure it as you're using it for to increase you know, for tourism related to maybe hunters coming in for a hunt, but maybe also those same improvements can be used by your shareholders or your tribal members for subsistence hunting, and there's not really any difference between the two right in terms of at least from the focus of this grant. And the same thing with cultural arts and tourism facilities. Those are also facilities that while they can be used for tourism, I'm sure there's also probably additional uses that you could use to benefit the community as a whole.
Press, Chris, yes, we received a question on, and can tribes use HUD funds to build housing and overcrowded overcrowded houses in their community.
Yes, for those HUD those kind of competitive grants, I was talking about. If you're awarded Windows grants, you know, building out homeless shelters or building out housing to be able to put homeless in those shelters, is certainly an eligible use. And because reducing the overcrowded houses I think is that would certainly be knowledge leaves. And I see we have another question about, you know, maintaining the Western winter trust system I suppose for winter Yes, I would certainly think that that could, you could structure that as, that's a tourism use right, you're able to go when you make those improvements. Now you can kind of, quote unquote, advertise to the world that hey, you're available to come here and visit us in a winter because we have these access these access points with that are maintained even in the winter. It is a grant application so, you know, you'd have to submit an explain why you're doing it and how it's related to travel tourism, recreation, but again, those are very broad scopes and particularly in that recreation, you know they're not saying that's limited to tourists right it's recreation program in general, I would argue that that would include your community members. And, you know, I mean, the government may view your subsistence hunting as recreation when, you know, when the truth is subsistence hunting, but it still would be able to potential source of funds to fund construction or fund improvements that would help in general. So the opening applications they open on September 1 2021. Now, eta said they don't have any specific deadline, but that it doesn't tend to award funds by September 30 of next year, and is occurring applications by January 31 of this year. And the reason for that is that it's kind of a rolling. It's a rolling process of when they award the money, and then once they use up all the funds, there's nothing left over for new applications. So if you're going to seek these types of funds, they're encouraging you to submit your application by January 31 2022 to kind of make sure that you're, you have at least have a piece of the of the funding pie, so to speak. Here's the links to the program description on the FDA website, and they also have again have two good guidance. Guidance as terms of the opportunity and then also a frequently asked questions about the grant talks about the grant. The grants.
We're also gonna talk about the emergency World Health Care grant program. And so this is a program that they set aside $500 million in grant funding to help broaden access to both COVID-19 testing and vaccines also healthcare services and food assistance. This is run through the USDA. So as I said $500 million has been set aside for it, and they, they've kind of put it in a two different what they've kind of kind of what they say, they think reprinted as tears, but two different kind of trenches, one tranche of the money is for recovery grants and these are grants gonna be between $25,000, up to a million. And then the second tranche is for impact grants, which is between 5 million, and 10 million. So, for eligible recipients. They include federally recognized Indian tribes in a rural area, which is going to essentially include all Alaska native tribes for impact grants, which is the 5 million to 10 million. In addition to being a federally recognized Indian tribe in a rural area. There you also have to your applicant must also be established a what they say network or consortium of entities, for the purposes of the impact grant. This means that to apply for that impact grant, you have to be basically comprised of three or more entities, of which at least two thirds are located in rural areas, and one of them is designated as a lead entity. As I see in the bond returns rural and rural areas any area other than a city, town, or unincorporated area that has a population of greater than 20,000 inhabitants. So essentially, if you're in a city, town or unincorporated area with $20,000 or less you're in a rural area. So recovery grants recovery grants are for our to help rural hospitals and local communities broaden their access to COVID-19 vaccines and testing healthcare services including telehealth services and food assistance through food banks and food distribution facilities in rural areas, as we see that's a pretty broad purpose. The idea of these grants are between extra 25,000 and $1 million is to enhance your health care facilities and food security and food assistance. The impact grants are for kind of longer range projects, therefore, for funding. Third, the impact impact grants are intended to fund, kind of, to plan for implement and evaluate models to support the long term sustainability of rural health care, which is broadly defined as kind of programs that will result in improved health outcomes improved access to health care, and maintaining health care within the community as a key economic driver. So eligible uses in more specifics here, recovery grants, immediate health care needs stemming from the pandemic of vaccines testing, etc quarantine housing, etc, preparedness for a future pandemic event that's supplies and facilities that would help you address the future pandemics, increased access to quality health care services to improve community health care comes very broad category because medical supplies for if you have a health clinic includes lost revenue, and because increased telehealth capabilities both temporary and permanent structures to provide health care services, support staffing needs for vaccine administration and Support Facility equipment for food banks and food distribution facilities, including transportation vehicles food storage and other equipment. As you can see, these are very broad uses of these funds, particularly in regards to food storage food security, food distribution and health care, and they're not necessarily, unlike the Cares Act funds, they do not necessarily have to be directly tied to the COVID 19 pandemic, you can use them say hey we just want to better health care, we just want to better health care facilities. We want to have a better food storage, we want to have better food distribution. And you could use these grant funds for those purposes. We had a question about communication systems, given that rural communities have no ability to dial 911 I think that would be both a potential use for the capital projects fund that we originally described, but also certainly for these types of this grant program as well as emergency rural health care, because that would increase the quality healthcare services by providing better access to 911 or two other healthcare providers for telehealth etc so yes I think that would be eligible use to expand that to increase and and make those combat those connections, better. The question is Can nonprofits that have a food bank apply for this to distribute food. I don't believe that it's available to nonprofits, I think that includes federally recognized. I don't know that improves nonprofits, that is something though that I can check on and get back to you, Christina. It would make sense that it should but again I don't know for sure that it is, maybe, sir, I guess we can maybe make sure remember we can respond to the group on that, once I clarify that.
In terms of the impact grants. This is a kind of much more technical and detailed use of the funds. Essentially what they're trying to what they're for the impact grants which are the much larger grants available, they want you to establish kind of health consortiums that will have a broad and long term impact on prod, that will develop that will implement projects that will broad and long term impact on kind of general health care in the area. Essentially they want these projects to solve regional healthcare problems and address the long term sustainability of rural health care, rather than kind of the immediate needs of an individual village or individual health, health care provider.
It is a very broad scope for example, one of the permissible uses is to identify a health related problem within the applicants region, develop and implement a method, a solution to overcome the problem and conduct a program evaluation to examine health related outcomes. Again that's a very broad scope, it's kind of just, it doesn't touch upon health and it's probably an eligible use. But again, these impact grants are only available for these consortiums of entities that are going to provide kind of broad region based services. You cannot use these types of grant programs for kind of expenses or losses are reimbursed from other sources. You can't use the expenses to pay for staffing needs for those that exceed an annual salary of $100,000. You cannot use them for construction to facilities either their construction, renovation or purchase of facilities located in non. Well, my PowerPoint says non dual areas I suppose to be non rural areas. So in urban areas, you cannot use it for purposes for purchase or acquisition costs for facilities or property, and to pay for existing in Dead indebtedness unrelated to the COVID 19 pandemic. They want you to be improving existing facilities, rather than in the rural area. Now in terms of the application. It's not that they don't fully 100% fund the project, they fund between 15 to 75% of the total eligible costs, depending on the size and medium household income of the project to be served. And what that is saying is that when you submit your application, you're gonna say all right, I want to. I'm going to, I want to have this emergent this grant. To address this issue, this, this need in this specific community. Well, then they will look at that specific community, identify what it's the size of the community how many people are in it, and what it's medium household income, and based on the amount of people there and the amount of median income, there's a different different percentages of your total project cost will be eligible for grant funding. As I said between 15 and 75%, notably as your community gets smaller. And as your median household income goes down, the higher the percentage of your total project will be funded with a grant. So the smallest communities with the lowest median household income will get the 75% grant grant funding, whereas the communities that have a larger community, with a higher median income will be a smaller percentage, all the way down to 15% and in the in the guidance that they produce, they kind of have a very specific definition of where these different kind of trenches of funding are notably a project can include lost revenue. So if your facility located in a real community for example of less than five with a less than $5,000 population, and a medium household income of less than 60% of the state, non metropolitan medium household income, you're eligible for generally for a maximum project cost of 75% So if you had a project say that cost $100,000 as the example here, the grant would be for $75,000, and you'd have to kind of CO share, or CO fund $25,000 of that project. However, what's interesting is that they have defined project to include medical facilities that have lost revenue. So if you had $100,000 of lost revenue, that's your critical project, and you can get $75,000 of grant money to replace 75% of that lost revenue. And once you get that $75,000 You could use that fund from but that money for whatever you want, just goes in your general fund. So if you're a tribal entity that's running some type of health clinic or health care facility or other facility that may be kind of an eligible and eligible applicant under this and you've had lost revenue due to COVID. This is a great opportunity to potentially recover or get a grant to cover at least up to 75% of that loss revenue. These applications opened in August of 2021 and recovery grants. So recovery grants which are the kind of treatments, right. Yeah, the recovery grants, which are the, the immediate app the kind of immediate needs, we need x number X number of dollars to do this healthcare facility to do this food assistance, or for the lost revenue. Those are submitted on are to be submitted on a rolling basis and the program ends when the funds are exhausted. The impact grants the deadline was a couple days ago. That's where the consortium, so that's not eligible. Those aren't eligible but for the recovery grants. If you fit within the eligibility if you have somebody who needs your losses or needs. This is something that you want to jump on as quickly as possible because again, this is kind of the program will end when funds are exhausted and we don't necessarily know when that's going to be here the links to the program description again is run by the USDA, I'd have a very good guidance that I found was very detailed and extensive and it kind of walks you through the process of what you need to include your application, how to submit it, etc.
And that's the last of the funding opportunities we're gonna address right now, for the purposes of this meeting, or this presentation, what we tried to do was addressed the ones that we knew were coming up like in October or November or early December, because the most immediate needs. In future meetings, we're going to try to be, you know, kind of, we're going to continue to kind of look down the calendar so to speak, and try to make sure that we're giving you as much lead time as we can for future funding opportunities, but again with a focus on those that are gonna have deadlines that are coming up sooner than later.
And let's see. I think we answered all the questions in the chat, and so I want to open it up to anybody else have any questions, I'm happy to ask or try to answer questions about the specific funding opportunities we addressed. Um, and I guess with Sarah's permission I mean if you have questions about Cares Act or ARPA funds. I'm happy to answer those as well.
One thing on the ARP on the Cares Act funds just because I just heard, heard about it today and I don't know if we have folks from agencies or tribes that are still dealing with kind of shareholder assistance programs, but Treasury advised, one of my clients and my clients authorized me to share it with the ANC community in general, that if you're providing a shareholder assistance program that Treasury does say that you should comply with any withholding orders like child support withholding orders that you're subjected to that those shareholder assistance payments will still be validly subject to those withholding orders, and you should withhold the funds. I know that was an open question for a lot of folks and we really did not get any good guidance from Treasury for a long time, until just frankly today, but just to let everybody know that extent that you've received withholding orders from the courts, you still need to comply with those when you're making your shareholder financial assistance payments.
Thanks Chris. Chris we. There's a question about training sessions on how to enter reports into the portal and meals and dress and joined us with the Alaska Municipal League, and I will let Neil's respond a little bit more if he is able. But yes, we will have additional trainings on Cares Act reporting and ARPA reporting. So hi Niels if you're able to join.
Yeah, I think only to say that you are plan is over the coming weeks to try to address those reporting questions specifically both for carriers and an ARPA, at least with ARPA we we have that extension and then for carriers act we do have the quarterly reports. So, we'll dig into that a little bit more nice covering sessions
and nails I will just add to. If, on the AFM navigator website, there is a link that links you to the Alaska Municipal League, the Alaska Arbor website for reporting and compliance, and so that you can also follow up individually, as well as through the trainings.
Any other questions or thoughts or comments. And, Christina yes we will be posting this on the AFM navigator website if you go back into the calendar, under the events and programs, and click on the link for past sessions or past trainings. There will be a video and link to the materials.
Um, can you hear me.
I can Hi Christina.
Alright, sorry my daughter in the background too. I'm like the issue with that I've found is some of our tribes can't access recordings of webinars because the bandwidth capacity is not there. So that's why I was like, Is there a type of something that I can send them in writing that they could reference instead of having to listen to a webinar.
Oh, sure. So Chris, what we have been doing is making the slides also available. In addition to the, to the recording. Oh and Aaron just pointed out to we will have a transcript of this, a written transcript as well.
And I did just want to again highlight this on the Alaska Arca website from the Municipal League it's really an awesome resource. I'm going to share it real quick because I just wanted to highlight a couple of things. So under ARPA, you know you can have the potential for the to recover lost revenue. Although the way they've described it in the in the guidance seem to be overly complicated, but it appears that, you know ARPA has a nice calculator that you could use to help generate determine if you have lost revenue. And so I think again, if, as you're kind of looking down these, these issues. This is just an amazing website to you to constantly refer back to. I know I use it frankly and I know, so thanks Niels for having me slowly set this up this is a great resource for everybody.
And Chris. Also on that Alaska ARPA website as well there is a link for this trial tribes. And so, opportunities that are specific just for tribes is also listed that you can go to that website there that, click on that link as well. excellently.
All right.
Any other questions, comments.
Thank you.
All right, well also next thursday from 12 to one will be our next training, and I was sorry I don't, I meant to have it up and I've clicked out of it so give me just one minute. Here we go. The next training will be on, but also on ARPA funding, so again eligible uses tracking and reporting.
All right, well, if there's no other questions where you're about six minutes early, and thank you Chris, that was great presentation. Lots of good information, really appreciate walking through all of those. and
