HomeMy WebLinkAboutMemo - Mail Packet - 6/7/2022 - Memorandum From Travis Storin Re: Grants Management (5)
Financial Services
215 N. Mason
2nd Floor
PO Box 580
Fort Collins, CO 80522
970.221.6788
www.fcgov.com/finance/
Memorandum
To: Mayor & Councilmembers
From: Travis Storin, Chief Financial Officer
Thru: Kelly DiMartino, Interim City Manager
Date: June 1, 2022
CC: Blaine Dunn, Accounting Director
Dave Lenz, FP&A Director
Subject: Grants Management
_____________________________________________________________________________
Purpose:
The purpose of this memo is to:
Report recent years’ experience with external grant applications for funding of City programs,
priorities, and projects.
Describing the current duties performed by City Staff
Describe upcoming enhancements and strategies to City grant administration, including a newly-
activated position in Financial Services funded by a federally-allowable indirect cost recovery.
Background:
Pre-pandemic, the City managed $16-24 million in federal grant dollars across some 40-60 grant awards
on an annual basis. The majority of grant volumes and dollars go toward 1) CDBG/Home for affordable
housing, 2) Transfort operations and capital replacement via Federal Transit Authority, and 3) DOT
grants for transportation infrastructure. Additionally, the City has typically managed approximately $16
million in state funding awards each year.
There is not currently a cogent, enterprise-level, and centralized process to strategically plan, prioritize,
or track which department pursues a given grant and for which project(s). Moreover, departments hire,
train, and manage their own grant application writers. Grant applications vs. awards (i.e. the “win rate”)
are not consistently reported and departments don’t have visibility into the applications of other
departments.
DocuSign Envelope ID: 08972FA4-9025-4C94-B588-5BAC6CF40CF3
Below is the information currently accessible by staff for grant activities for 2017-2021.
Grant awards successfully received:
Year Federal State Local Foundation Total
2021 65 48 3 4 120
2020 52 42 3 4 101
2019 44 29 1 6 80
2018 35 19 1 5 60
2017 33 11 1 3 48
Grant revenue received over past 5 years by type:
Year Federal State Local Foundation Total
2021 28,160,422 16,632,399 336,321 97,829 45,226,972
2020 33,923,837 17,246,452 64,828 67,320 51,302,437
2019 29,326,618 16,552,911 16,546 134,727 46,030,802
2018 14,762,270 14,348,088 3,454 107,924 29,221,736
2017 7,668,070 15,085,179 25,000 103,369 22,881,619
Grant management is effectively divided between pre-award and post-award activities, or in other words
the tasks and duties necessary prior to the point grant receipt vs. the compliance and reporting
obligations that happen after receipt.
The visual below describes the duties that the City currently performs in green, and the current gaps in
red.
DocuSign Envelope ID: 08972FA4-9025-4C94-B588-5BAC6CF40CF3
Currently, grant applications are managed by individual departments. The grant opportunities
themselves are identified through several sources:
1. Centralized “push”-style publications from Financial Services, curated by the eCivis software
platform
2. Department-identified opportunities through contacts within and publications from federal and
state agencies
3. Publications through National League of Cities, Colorado Municipal League, and other industry
associations
Funding opportunity: Indirect Cost Recovery
Federal grants typically allow for 10% “de minimis” cost recovery on Modified Total Direct Cost
(MTDC), meaning virtually all costs excluding equipment and capital. This 10% rate is intended to be
an automatic entitlement to grant recipients to help cover the cost of general overhead, although many
recipients in other industries (e.g., higher education or scientific research) negotiate a higher rate for
overhead cost recovery.
For the City of Fort Collins, staff has not historically applied for the 10% recovery amount, which is
estimated to be upwards of $1.3M per year. It has been suggested to current staff that past staff members
elected not to request the 10% recovery amount for risk of putting City applications in an uncompetitive
position. However, in the experience of current staff the 10% indirect cost recovery would not affect the
success rate of our applications and is overwhelmingly common among other grant recipients across a
variety of industries.
Go-Forward Strategy to Meet Emerging Business Needs
Financial Services has a vacancy in its Program Evaluation team due to an internal candidate being
promoted into the Recovery Manager role. In response to an increasingly robust environment of federal
and state grant opportunities, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), staff is
repurposing the vacant Program Evaluation role to a Grants Administrator in fiscal year 2022.
Beginning in fiscal year 2023, this position will be cost neutral by offsetting with the 10% indirect cost
recovery. At that time, staff would consider reinstatement of the Program Evaluation role from its
previous General Fund source.
During the hiring process for the Grants Administrator, our Recovery Manager will be asked to work on
the program level coordination for IIJA dollars, as agencies at the state and federal level begin to publish
their Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) in early summer 2022.
Key duties of the Grants Administrator will include identification of funding opportunities, central
leadership for largescale inter-department grants, departmental capacity development through training,
prioritization of enterprise grant strategies for specific opportunities, and enhanced enterprise reporting
around opportunities tracked, applied for, and awarded.
DocuSign Envelope ID: 08972FA4-9025-4C94-B588-5BAC6CF40CF3