Breaking down Escambia's outside agency funding requests


  • September 21, 2015
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   community-dashboard

Amy Philley teaches students about planets and the solar system in her VPK class at the Gonzalez United Methodist Child Enrichment Center in Cantonment, Fl. Wednesday, April 29, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Studer Institute)

How much will Escambia County spend to make sure our 5-year-olds are ready for kindergarten?

How much will we put toward making sure our neighbors without health insurance have access to primary health care?

What price tag will we put on economic development funding?

How will the tourist development tax revenue be divvied up?

Soon Escambia County Commissioners could answer those questions. Commissioners will have a second hearing on the 2016 budget beginning at 5:01 p.m. Sept. 22, which includes more than $11 million in requests from outside agencies for money. The first hearing was Sept. 8. The agenda for that meeting is linked here.

Kindergarten readiness, public health, job creation and tourism development are among the 16 metrics in the Studer Community Institute’s Pensacola Metro Dashboard. The dashboard, developed with the University of West Florida, provides an at-a-glance look at the area’s growth, educational attainment, economic prospects, safety and civic life.

Last year, the county spent $9,701,376 on such requests. For 2016, the requests total $11,129,047 — a 14.7 percent increase, mostly in requests for money from the general fund.

In some of the dashboard's key metrics:

{{business_name}}VPK students work together during an Earth Day project at Lincoln Park Primary School in Pensacola, Fl. Thursday, April 23, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

VPK students work together during an Earth Day project at Lincoln Park Primary School in Pensacola, Fl. Thursday, April 23, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

Kindergarten readiness: The Escambia County Early Learning Coalition has asked for $300,000. The coalition is the entity that manages the local component of the state voluntary prekindergarten program, as well as a school readiness program that helps children ages 0-3 get access to quality, education-based daycare services. Last year, the county gave the coalition $218,500. Data analysis from the state Office of Early Learning shows that only 66.2 percent of Escambia kindergartners were ready for school in 2014.

Healthier community: Access to a primary care physician is a key to improving a person’s health. Census data indicates 17 percent of Escambia residents — 48,280 people — do not have health insurance.

{{business_name}} Dr. George Smith sees a patient at the Escambia Community Clinic. The clinic had to relocate after last April's flooding.

Dr. George Smith sees a patient at the Escambia Community Clinic. The clinic had to relocate after last April's flooding.

Eighteen percent of Escambia residents — 51,140 people — are enrolled in Medicaid, which is state-funded coverage for low-income people. Medicare, which covers senior citizens, accounts for 51,720 people.

Escambia Community Clinics asked $525,000 for 2016; last year the county gave them $431,880. Chandra Smiley, director of the clinics that serve the medically needy and uninsured through primary, dental, mental health, pediatric services, said the clinics had 89,000 outpatient visits this fiscal year. Of those, 92 percent come from Escambia County, she said.

Job creation: The county contributes to the cause of job creation through economic development agencies such as the Pensacola Economic Development Association, now known as FloridaWest; the Gulf Coast African-American Chamber of Commerce and the Century Chamber of Commerce. The requests for 2016 from those entities is $650,000; down $738,062. That difference is accounted for by moving the utility assistance program out of this category and into the general fund.

{{business_name}}Historic Pensacola Village. Image courtesy of Visit Pensacola

Historic Pensacola Village. Image courtesy of Visit Pensacola

Bed taxes: Bed taxes — formally known as tourist development taxes — are the four pennies charged to the cost of motel and hotel rooms in the county. Revenue from the first three cents will go primarily to Visit Pensacola, the tourism promotion entity for the area, which stands to receive $5,412,863 in 2016. In 2015, Visit Pensacola received $5,668,232.

The proceeds from the fourth cent will go to a variety of entities, with Arts, Culture and Entertainment Inc. leading the pack with a $1,092,128 request for 2016.

A new level of detail in requests

Assistant County Administrator Amy Lovoy asked outside agencies to re-submit their requests for funding using a form that includes copies of the entity’s most recent completed tax return, amount requested, the agency’s total budget, what the county funds will be used for, goals of program, and performance measures they would like the board to use to gauge their success.

“If you were a nonprofit receiving monies we tried to say you’re going to go through this process,” Lovoy said.

It was a step toward the kind of accountability and transparency commissioners said they wanted for a process that can seem muddled.

General funding categories for outside agencies

General funding available: $1,452,082

Economic development: $640,000.

Three cents tourist tax: $4,167,500.

Fourth cent tourist tax: $1,660,650.

Local option sales tax: None.

Solid waste management fund: $60,000.

Find the detailed forms submitted by every entity online here.

Smiley said the most pressing concern for her agency is the finding a permanent replacement for the clinic site on West Jordan Street, which was rendered unusable by the April 2014 flood.  

{{business_name}}The Escambia Community Clinic, located at 2200 N. Palafox St. saw about 2.5 feet of water during the April 2014 flood. Because the facility has flooded several times, clinic officials decided to relocate to a professional building located at 14 W. Jordan St.

The Escambia Community Clinic, located at 2200 N. Palafox St. saw about 2.5 feet of water during the April 2014 flood. Because the facility has flooded several times, clinic officials decided to relocate to a professional building located at 14 W. Jordan St.

“Three of our sites were impacted by the flood, (and) we’re in temporary locations at 14 W. Jordan St, and looking to relocate,” Smiley said. The main clinic, Smiley said, had 2 ½ feet of water in it. “FEMA says it is a repetitive flood site that was our sixth flooding incident,” she said.

Smiley said 26 percent of clinic patients have no insurance; it costs $140 per visit in care the clinic provides. County funding covers $43 of that total.

She also noted that the clinics do patient satisfaction surveys monthly, asking randomly selected patients about their experience.

“We’re at 82 percent (satisfaction score),” she said. “Our goal is 95 percent for 2016.”

Commissioner Grover Robinson noted that as state government has passed on to local governments more of the burden of Medicaid payments, he would like the flexibility to loop Smiley’s group into that continuum of care. The county, he said, now has $4.8 million in Medicaid payments it must cover.

“It would be my hope that the state would allow counties to use that $4.8 million to provide it to real opportunities like Escambia Community Clinics, that could take care of our medically indigent,” Robinson said. “I think that would reduce Medicaid expenses down the line. I’d rather give it to her than Tallahassee. I think we could put it to better use if we spent it in our community.”

Early learning

Bruce Watson, executive director of the Early Learning Coalition, noted that the $218,500 the county gives his agency has been unchanged for three years, when commissioners instituted 5 percent across-the-board budget cuts.

“Our program is critical to getting our working parents child care for their children,” said Watson. “For every $3,500 you give us, that’s another child who is that much more prepared for kindergarten the following year.”

{{business_name}}Keaton Braswell, Luke Graham and Finley Krantz look at butterflies hatching in their VPK class at the Gonzalez United Methodist Child Enrichment Center in Cantonment, Fl. Wednesday, April 29, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

Keaton Braswell, Luke Graham and Finley Krantz look at butterflies hatching in their VPK class at the Gonzalez United Methodist Child Enrichment Center in Cantonment, Fl. Wednesday, April 29, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

Watson must raise $500,000 annually to fulfill his matching funds obligation, which allows federal funding to flow to the coalition through Community Development Block Grants. The county allocation goes toward that total match.

Watson said he must raise $1 for every $16 he gets from the federal government to maintain that federal funding stream.  

“Until three years ago we had to ask for a waiver every year for not making our match,” Watson said. “If we don’t raise that money, we do put at risk the $6 million to $7 million from the federal government. They’ve never penalized us, but there is the possibility of them doing so.”

“I certainly have deep concern about school readiness,” said Commissioner Lumon May. “I wish we would have more of a cooperative coalition with (the Florida Department of Education, which oversees, but gives no money toward school readiness programs). I think it’s a problem for the educational system.”

Said Watson: “You may have noticed in the dashboard put out by the Studer Community Institute last Sunday that we were (66) percent ready for kindergarten and and (66) percent of our children are graduating 12 years later,” Watson said. “There is a correlation there. This is the place to put your money. A dollar today will save you $16 in social services later. We’re the only agency that can offer you a 16-1 return ratio.”

Commissioner Doug Underhill noted “what a small portion of your budget comes from private sector when this one issue comes up in every discussion we have in Escambia County.

“We know this is where we are losing our kids. It seems to me our business sector would look at this as workforce development 20 years down the road.”

Watson said he feels he has made inroads in past six months with the business community, and he noted that United Way has been supportive of the coalition over the years.

Job creation

Where the best bang for the buck is in the job creation game was a dominant piece of the conversation when it came to the $650,000 up for consideration. (Read more here about the economic development ad valorem tax exemptions — or EDATEs — that are on the books in Escambia County.)

Underhill noted a “fairly decent body of study that says the (return on investment) on this type of direct investment is not often as it was advertised. We have a tech park that is essentially a vacant lot. VT-MAE, as I it looks at it, it looks like an awful lot of money to spend to procure some fairly average jobs. How do we really measure the value of those dollars?”

CEDA by the numbers

The Community Economic Development Association, which preceded Florida West had:

— A budget of $1.08 million.

— A staff for five full-time and two part-time employees (approximately $500,000 of budget).

— Since 2011, Vision 2015/CEDA has created more than 8,800 new jobs with average salary of $51,000.

— More than $65,000,000 in state, local and federal incentives were awarded in this time. The range of incentives include worker training incentives, qualified target industry incentives (tax credits per job created), economic development ad valorem tax exemptions (EDATES) and some funds available through various oil spill legislation.

For a look back at how FloridaWest's preceding agency — CEDA — fared in the job creation business, read more here.

Scott Luth, executive director of FloridaWest which manages the tech park next to the Pensacola Bay Center that Underhill referenced, acknowledged the issues with that property. Space Florida is spending $1.5 million to design a building for the tech park for an as-yet-unnamed tenant.

{{business_name}}The sign for the Pensacola Technology Campus. Photo credit: Shannon Nickinson

The sign for the Pensacola Technology Campus. Photo credit: Shannon Nickinson

“It is a project that has had a lot of struggles,” Luth said. “All I can say is we are reaching that point of making something work in the park or sitting down with all of our partners to make an evaluation of what is the highest, best use of that property.”

The document governing that property expires in April 2016, Luth said.

“I hope we will have resolution on that project within the next couple of months. If it does not materialize like we hope, we’ll bring the partners back to the table and say what do we want to do with the asset the community invested in four or five years ago.”

Commissioner Wilson Robertson said, “I think the potential is still there for the tech park. I still believe and we’ll know within a few months.”

Commissioner May noted that with his district’s high unemployment rate, he’d like to see a ZIP code map of job creation in the county.

“My other point of concern is, how do we correlate our educational track with our economic development track?” May said. “If we’re not creating jobs for the education system we have here, we’re going in to two different directions. I’m not interested in creating jobs to import people from Crestview (to fill).”

Robertson countered with a variation of the ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ argument — “I don’t think it matters what ZIP code you’re creating those jobs in.”

“If you don’t have a car in Warrington,” said Underhill, “10,000 jobs at Navy Federal, where we don’t even have a bus line running to, doesn’t do you any good. If our citizens can’t reach out and grab that ring, the ring doesn’t do them any good.”

Commission Chairman Steven Barry said maybe the county can gauge its success in job creation not on a number-of-jobs created basis, but on how well it sets up infrastructure to support business development and expansion.

“Maybe the long-term investment is having a place where people want to come, having good rail or airport access, having good (broadband internet) lines, having good infrastructure so that they want to be here, not just a per-job thing.”  

Barry said as the county considers why, for example the central commerce park in Cantonment “hasn’t really taken off, for whatever reason. As we might move forward with the (outlying field 8 land swap project), those concerns are at least worth talking about.”

Tourism development dollars

Visit Pensacola and Arts, Culture and Entertainment Inc. will lead the pack of outside agencies that will get taxpayer money to support and promote events that draw visitors to the area and encourage locals to spend their dollars.

{{business_name}}Foo Foo Fest

Commissioners also talked about Visit Pensacola taking over some of the discretionary funds that each commissioner gets for events in his district. It’s $50,000 per district.

Robertson said, for example, he has used money from his allotment to support Five Flag Speedway. Barry noted that smaller events, such as a homecoming weekend celebration in Barrineau Park, may not draw big numbers but are incredibly important to the communities they serve.

There could be limitations to that plan. ACE, director David Bear noted, has a micro-grant program to support small events, but it only gives to nonprofits.

“If the core mission is the arts, they would have the opportunity to go to ACE,” said Visit Pensacola’s Steve Hayes. “If the core mission is sports, they would have the opportunity to go to the Pensacola Sports Association. If the core mission is the community, they would have the opportunity to go to Visit Pensacola.”

“As long as we set the parameters,” said May. “Part of the reason we wanted these monies, it was to help our constituents with things that are important in our district. Barrineau Park is important to Commissioner Barry; 5 Flags is important to Commissioner Robertson; Gladys Knight is important to Commissioner May. Ultimately it comes back to us.”

Here is the list as it stands so far:

{{business_name}}outside agencies016 as Amended.xlsx
 
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