UPDATE: Tederick, Ham debate requested CARES funding documentation

An unexpected confrontation over legal accountability for the local distribution of federal CARES Act relief funding erupted during Interim Town Manager Matt Tederick’s update on Town business to the Warren County Board of Supervisors Tuesday morning, September 1st.

As Tederick summarized the Town distribution process and numbers on the first round of the Town’s distribution of its $1.2 million of Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) money to what he estimated as about one hundred in-town businesses, in response to a question County Attorney Jason Ham injected issues he had with documents submitted for approval to Town staff included in a draft agreement as part of the Consent Agenda of Tuesday’s County Board meeting.

Ham recounted exchanges with Town Attorney Doug Napier on the wording of a proposed agreement, noting he had not heard back on suggested changes that were up for approval later in the meeting.

“Attorneys tend to deal in law, I tend to deal in reality,” Tederick said at one point attempting to differentiate the “playing field” at issue from his perspective. Asked later about that reference and whether the law wasn’t grounded in reality, Tederick indicated not in the case of what he termed “extraordinary, extra-legal, unnecessary documentation” as he was dealing with being requested by the interim county attorney in the referenced County-prepared draft agreement.

Jason Ham and Matt Tederick weren’t seeing eye to eye over requested Town documentation of its CARES Act distribution funds Tuesday morning. Royal Examiner Photos by Roger Bianchini – Royal Examiner Video by Mark Williams

“My issue is with the bureaucratic process. It should be very simple – but the county attorney wants to make it erroneous,” Tederick said in a phone interview, repeating a word he used earlier in responding to Ham about the proposed agreement prepared by the county’s interim lead attorney scheduled for a vote as part of Tuesday’s Consent Agenda. As he did during his meeting report confrontation with Ham over the agreement, Tederick referenced an agreement drafted between two other municipalities he called a “template” for all other municipalities in the commonwealth.

That 2-1/3 page agreement is called the Kilmarnock Agreement.

During our subsequent phone conversation, Tederick took particular exception to a passage from a sentence on page 2 of the 3-1/2-page draft CARES agreement prepared by Ham, apparently with input from County Deputy Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Farrall. That sentence is point one of a 13-point agreement directive.

“That the County will distribute to the Town the sum of $2,478,116 from the CRF funds distributed to the County (that is in Phases 1 and 2 totaling about $7 million in two increments of $3.5 million of which the Town receives $1.2 million each time based on relative populations), contingent upon the Town using such funds for expenses that are reimbursable under the Act,” Tederick cited, saying he believed the sentence should end there with a period.

Rather, he noted it continues, he believes unnecessarily, to add, “upon the Town providing documentation to the County sufficient to prove that such expenses are reimbursable and that the Town complies with all other applicable laws and County Requirements concerning the expenditure of the funds, including but not limited to requirements that will specify the timeline for the submission of such documentation by the Town, all as determined by the Deputy Emergency Coordinator in consultation with the County Attorney.”

Tederick complained that in the end, the County judgment brought to bear would be subjective, rather than objectively ascertained through the CARES Act guidelines.

“They want copies of all our records, they want canceled checks; they’re going to go through each record, each file to make a determination – then it’s subjective. All this time and effort for what a two-page document will satisfy. It’s absurd,” Tederick said of Ham’s additional page and a quarter to his preferred Kilmarnock Agreement.

And the debate continues …

Tederick insisted the Town was accepting liability for its CARES Act distribution without the additional legal verbiage. “The Kilmarnock Agreement was vetted June 5 … It is a template used across Virginia … If they want to play these games, play them … Council may not sign any of it – we may have to turn all the money back,” Tederick said of what he estimated during the meeting at about $970,000 thus far distributed in round one funding. However, he added his understanding was that Counties had to distribute some of their CARES funds to town municipalities within their jurisdiction.

“I’m not certain it’s legal that they can tell us how to spend it – We certify that we are liable but Mr. Ham makes it more complicated,” Tederick observed.

Asked if he thought Ham had gone rogue and was working outside the purview of the supervisors, Tederick replied, “You’ll have to ask him.”

Alerted by our cameraman that the board had come out of a three-hour closed session at 2:30 p.m. before re-adjourning to a work session, we returned from our initial work on this story to the Warren County Government Center (WCGC) to try and get an answer to that question. But with Ham departed for his home base office, following a two-item work session we asked County Board Chairman Walt Mabe if Ham had worked independently on the preparation of the agreement or received direction from the supervisors.

“He’s working with the board to make sure that the guidelines are being followed as to the way they are written. And we’re not trying to do anything outside the rules. And if we give it (the agreement) to the Town we get some sort of protection to make sure that if they do something wrong, we don’t have to pay for it. It could come back to us, and we don’t want that to happen.

“He’s doing nothing ‘out of school’,” Mabe said of the interim county attorney’s work on the draft agreement.

Deputy County Emergency Management Coordinator Rick Farrall has found himself on the periphery of a Town-County dispute over a draft agreement on CARES Act funding. Farrall and Board Chair Walt Mabe agree the County isn’t asking anything of the Town, it isn’t asking of itself.

As Royal Examiner has noted in previous CARES Act funding coverage, as recipient municipalities, County’s are responsible to see that any money given to sub-jurisdiction municipalities for distribution is spent according to federal guidelines. If it isn’t, the County is held financially liable for any funds found to have been distributed outside federally prescribed guidelines.

Asked to react to Tederick’s assertion the Town might not sign the current draft agreement, potentially tanking the two municipalities CARES distribution arrangement, Mabe said, “I can’t comment on that one because you just listened to both sides of the communication that was going on (during the meeting). We’re not asking for anything we’re not doing ourselves,” Mabe said, echoing an earlier observation from County Deputy Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Farrall.

When asked about Tederick’s expressed preference for the Kilmarnock Agreement he called a “template” model for other jurisdictions in CARES Act grant sharing, Mabe questioned the accuracy or context of that statewide usage assertion. He also observed that the Kilmarnock Agreement had been introduced into the County-Town CARES funding discussion by Interim County Attorney Ham.

As a consequence of the meeting discussion both that proposed County-Town agreement and one between the County and the Chamber of Commerce regarding the Chamber’s role in facilitating distribution of the CARES money locally, was removed from the agenda for further discussion. Ham worried that if no more progress toward a mutually acceptable agreement was made in the next two weeks than had been in the run-up to the September 1st meeting, both municipalities could be facing issues with necessary compliance time-frames for the CARES Act distribution. As Mabe and Supervisor Delores Oates explained to this reporter following Monday’s work session, municipalities have until September 30 to distribute first round CARES grants, and to December 30 for distribution of round two grant funds.

See the referenced and sometimes volatile exchanges between county legal and town administrative staffs beginning about two minutes into Tederick’s report in this Royal Examiner video: