St. Germain to spend ARPA surplus on building repairs

During its Feb. 22 meeting the St. Germain town board voted unanimously to spend the town’s windfall of leftover funds from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) on repairs to municipal buildings.

In November 2023, the board made it known publicly the town has a surplus $138,000 to spend as the result of redundant grants proffered by the state and federal governments.

In November of 2020, the town board voted to enter into a private / public partnership with ChoiceTel of Eagle River to begin construction on a broadband fiber-optic network to serve the entire town.

An early step of the process was to try to defray the cost of the infrastructure project through the Public Service Corporation (PSC) Broadband Grant Program, a Wisconsin state grant to install broadband internet in rural communities.

During a November 2020 meeting, board chairman Tom Christensen said ChoiceTel “is projecting it’s going to be at $1,197,850. And the grant pays 50% of that. So our responsibility for that would be $598,925.” 

Initially, the town anticipated the need to take out a loan for the roughly $600,000 to cover its half of the project. 

However, in June 2021 it was announced the town would receive roughly $225,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to be applied to the broadband installation.

As it ultimately turned out, the town could have skipped making any investment in a fiber-optic network at all.

In early 2022, town officials were notified Spectrum, a division of Charter Communications, would also be constructing a broadband network in St. Germain without any financial commitment from the town.

In August 2022, Christensen told The Lakeland Times “before we started with ChoiceTel — several years before that — we asked Spectrum ‘Hey, are you going to do something in our area?’. ‘Absolutely not,’ they said. ‘You don’t have enough people over there to warrant the investment to do it’. But now, the government throws a big hunk of money at them, and well, OK, now it’s a little easier to do it.”

“How are you going to predict that as a town board?,” Christensen asked. “We’re going to get this bad flu thing that’s going to screw everything up; everybody’s going to stay at home and do everything on the internet. That’s just what happened. Who was ever going to predict that in order to plan for it?”

At the same time, he leveled criticisms at the state and federal governments. “It’s bothersome to me that our government doesn’t better organize their resources to first be sure that everybody has coverage,” he said. “In my opinion, if I was the big nut at the federal level, I would work with each state and figure out how to get everybody covered with the money that we had available. But the state government is doing their thing, and the federal government is doing their thing, so we’re going to have two — basically identical — systems in the Town of St. Germain.”

“However,” Christensen said, “If the government’s goal is to get broadband service to every resident in the Town of St. Germain, they’re wasting money doing it.”

Last November, Christensen told the Times “the Spectrum people really pulled out all of the stops, so to speak, and just went nuts in installing the internet service in our town,” he said. “In ‘22, they started, and this year, they finished the entire town.”

“The infrastructure to supply the internet service to homes was finished at the end of October or the beginning of November,” Christensen said. “They (Charter) still have houses and businesses that they’re setting up on a regular basis. They’re hooking up the last of them from the road to the house.”

“But after the first year, and with the progress that we saw, and with their commitment to do the entire town — back in 2022, we weren’t sure they were doing the entire town — it just didn’t make sense to let ChoiceTel continue to install internet when it was already all over the town.”

Christensen said the decision to cease ChoiceTel’s work came long before Charter completed its fiber installation.

“We weren’t even that far along with the Charter/Spectrum people,” he said. “They were probably only halfway done with the town when it was very obvious they were going to have the entire town done way before ChoiceTel, so we actually stopped ChoiceTel this spring.”

During the November town board meeting, treasurer Jeanna Vogel told supervisors the clock is now ticking for the town to spend the $138.000 which was not paid to ChoiceTel.

“There is a concern that the clerk, treasurer, and deputy clerk/treasurer have in that the ARPA funds, in particular, need to be incurred by the end of next year and paid by December 2026,” she said.

On Feb. 22, Christensen told the board while several building-repair projects to town facilities were being considered, “we don’t have any numbers yet for pavilions, but we do have more numbers for (replacing) the doors, both for the fire department and for this building (the St. Germain Community Center)...I believe that the price of the doors is going to require a bidding process, so I don’t want to talk anymore about the dollars that are involved, because, obviously, that would affect the bidding process.”

“Each building can stand on its own,” he said, “But we’ve got a $25,000 limit there.” The “limit” to which he referred was the statutory requirement where projects costing more than $25,000 must be put out for a public, sealed-bidding process.

“The report has to be filed by the end of April,” said  Vogel, “So my concern would be do we think we’ll be using the whole total of the $138,000?”

“Yes,” Christensen chuckled in reply. “Oh, yes.”

Christensen anticipates the town should be able to complete the bidding process in time for sealed bids to be opened during the board’s last meeting in March.