Johnson County Supervisors roll the dice on COVID cash assistance

Advocates in Johnson County are feeling misled about the local government’s new pandemic relief program.

In a narrowly divided vote last month, the Board of Supervisors approved $2 million in federal COVID-19 funds to go toward lottery system for residents who were negatively impacted by the pandemic. Iowa City plans to contribute another $1.5 million to the effort. It's needed help but it’s a lot different from what we understood the program’s focus to be.

The idea to use some of the county’s American Rescue Plan Act allocation for direct cash assistance was put on the local agenda by undocumented migrant workers and their allies, led by the local organizations Escucha Mi Vo and Iowa City Catholic Worker House.

When the federal government sent out a series of three stimulus payments to individuals in 2020 and 2021, undocumented and incarcerated people were not included. Throughout months of discussion, the Johnson County relief fund was pitched as a way to backfill a portion of the federal stimulus checks that some local residents weren’t eligible for. It has been commonly referred to as an excluded workers fund.

That’s how we thought it would work when we praised the proposal in an editorial published last October. “Excluded workers are contributing members of our local communities and it made no sense for the federal government to shut them out of the cash payments,” The Gazette editorial board wrote at the time.

Instead, the payments will be open to a much broader subset of the local population and distributed through a random lottery system under a scheme approved by three of five supervisors at a recent meeting — some eligible applicants will receive $1,400 and some will receive nothing.

Two supervisors — Jon Green and Rod Sullivan — lobbied to prioritize residents who hadn’t received previous relief payments, in the original spirit of the excluded workers fund. County staff and a majority of board members favored a lottery with broader eligibility. A few of them questioned whether every excluded worker had truly suffered a pandemic hardship.

Analysts with the Federal Reserve acknowledge stimulus payments have contributed to inflation. When everyone else in the local economy got thousands in extra spending power from the government and you didn’t, it’s pretty obvious that you experienced a negative impact related to the pandemic.

Johnson County officials had the authority to put excluded workers at the front of the line and they chose not to. Instead, they’ll leave it up to chance.

(319) 398-8262; editorial@thegazette.com