Montgomery County spent at least $74,400 for a consulting firm to write reports and answer questions about opportunities to nab stimulus dollars, according to a contract obtained by The Examiner.
The money comes on top of the nearly $900,000 a year the cash-strapped county spends on its five-person office of Intergovernmental Relations. But those efforts are aimed mostly at Maryland, and the county said it needed help successfully navigating the gargantuan federal stimulus package.
The county is facing more than a $690 million budget deficit. The county’s Web site shows that it has been allotted more than $144 million in stimulus funding, and officials said it is in the running for four more grants worth about $90 million.
County Executive Ike Leggett’s spokesman, Patrick Lacefield, said the consulting firm’s help was invaluable in making sure the county was competitive for the stimulus funds.
“We should all get such a good return,” Lacefield said.
Montgomery County signed an eight-month contract in March with Baker & Daniels Consulting, an offshoot of an Indianapolis law firm with an office on K Street. The contract said the company would be paid $9,300 a month to advise the county on opportunities to tap into the federal government’s stimulus funds.
County officials also noted that they were hardly alone in hiring outside experts to be more competitive at landing stimulus cash. Jurisdictions from around the country, including cities as small as a few thousand people, have hired lobbyists.
A spokesman for Fairfax County, which is similar to Montgomery in demographics and other measures, said the county did not hire outside help to navigate stimulus funding.
Part of the consultants’ duties included providing weekly reports that could be “quickly skimmed for relevance and interest” to keep county officials “abreast” of stimulus opportunities.
Lacefield said the county also needed the consulting firm’s help in meeting the federal government’s compliance standards. The county’s inspector general, Tom Dagley, recently suggested in a report that the county needed to spend more stimulus money on oversight. The county plans on cutting funds to Dagley’s office and its own Office of Internal Audit.
