By STEVE BANDY
Marshall City Commissioners Ed Hoffman, second from left, and Chris Paddie, far right, meet with U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, center, and Theresa Wang, Gohmert's legislative counsel, far left, during the National League of Cities Congressional City Conference recently in Washington, D.C.
City Commissioner Ed Hoffman returned from last week's National League of Cities Congressional City Conference with a sense of urgency.
The commissioner said he felt the conference, March 14-18 in Washington, D.C., was an important one to attend "because this is when they're doling out the money."
Hoffman was referring to the recently signed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
"It's $850 billion and they're just dumping the money," he said. "It's unbelievable. They don't even have guidelines on what to do with this money."
Four members of the local commission — Hoffman, Gloria Moon, Chris Paddie and John Wilborn — attended the conference and each will be invited to speak on the event during Thursday's city commission meeting.
Meanwhile, Hoffman noted that the city of Marshall is facing an uphill fight to benefit from the act.
"None of the money is being given to cities our size," he said, adding that only those municipalities with a population of 200,000 or more are specifically named in the allocations.
"We have to go to the state to get our money because the money has been allocated to the larger cities and the states," he continued. "However, 30 percent of the money that's allocated to the states must be spend on cities of 5,000 to 200,000 population."
That's where the urgency comes in.
"There are no guidelines on even how to apply for the money yet and some of it has got to be requested by the end of March," he said.
"Some of it we have until the end of the year, but if we don't get in line now, you know what happens to the guy who's last in line. You run out of money. We want to be early on," he continued.
"Maybe we're not going to get anything at all, but if we don't try we're guaranteed not to get anything."
Hoffman said he was encouraged by the show of support the Marshall delegation received from its Congressional officials.
"We had the opportunity to meet with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Louie Gohmert, all of whom were very supportive and who said they will work with us and help us try and get some of this money from the state," Hoffman said. "Chris (Paddie) and I had a real good working session — hours — with Rep. Gohmert and we will be working with Theresa Wang from his office as the point person on the application process.
"We will write the requests and they (Hutchison, Cornyn and Gohmert) will work with us to try and get some of these funds."
Hoffman said the four-day conference was divided into various general sessions and focus workshops.
"We (the four commissioners) tried to split up the workshops so we could attend as many as possible," he said.
For the general sessions, speakers included various Cabinet members and heads of numerous federal departments.
"We had a lot of big names," Hoffman said. "Mostly they spoke on their respective duties and the duties of their offices."
