Letter to the Editor: The seduction and deception of grants for the Driftless Area Education & Visitor Center

To the Editor:
As I began attending Supervisor meetings with concerns of taxpayer dollars being used to finance the new Conservation Board’s Driftless Area Education and Visitor Center, I began to see the seduction and danger of grants to our community. Grant money or free money - we all like things that are free.
The problem is there are strings attached. The process is arduous and time consuming. New employees need to be hired to continue to write and apply for more grants. Apply for a grant, present your hard work of the dream project, rejection, rewrite the grant. Do you wonder if the grant is what you want or what a government agency wants?
We receive the grant, but, we must use it before the deadline or you will lose the grant. The grant needs local donations to show the public is interested in the project. Foundations are established to find local donations from banks, businesses and private citizens. Fund raising companies are hired to determine how much our community can give. Money is needed to pay for these services. The consensus is no taxpayer dollars will be needed to pay for this project. The newspaper reports the findings. The citizens approve since no taxpayer dollars will be needed, and do not attend the educational meetings to give their feedback.
The process proceeds, but money is needed before the grants are approved. The Supervisors are on the Conservation Board and the Foundation Board to raise money and keep things going. Everyone is caught up in the excitement of the new building and all the tourism dollars we have been told will be added to our community if we build.
The funding is progressing slower than had hoped. The Conservation Board asks our Supervisors for permission to keep the project moving as the contracts must be signed or we will lose the$1.3 million National Scenic Byway Grant. The contracts are signed. If the grants, gifts and pledges don’t come through, the taxpayers are now involved. It’s not the way the project was represented, or what the Boards expected.
The project begins, the foundation is poured, the geothermal wells are dug. We wait for word on the CAT grant, no reply. The need for an interim bank loan arrives. The Conservation Board needs approval from the Board of Supervisors for the bank to approve the loan.
This process reminds me of a term I’ve recently learned: legal plunder. What is legal plunder? “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.” This definition comes from the book “The Law” by Frederic Bastiat. This is the deception of grants to our community.
What is the annual cost to maintain this building?  A cost of $12,000 was the first answer. Someone else suggested the rule of thumb is five percent of the building per year to sustain a building. For a $3.6 million project, that is $180,000 a year. That’s quite a difference. It makes me nervous as to the cost to the taxpayers for the life of the Driftless Area Education and Visitor Center.
Does anyone else feel we are being enslaved with higher tax dollars? The free grant money isn’t so free after all.

Mary Keatley
Waukon