Grant Dependency: Planning for ‘What If’ Scenarios in Siskiyou County

By Daniel Webster

In the next few days, I want to pose some rather difficult, yet helpful, questions regarding

“what do we do if . . .”

What do we do if grants dry up?

Siskiyou County – government and society – is rather dependent on grants. We need lots of government grants to run much of what happens around here. Siskiyou County is not unique in this issue. This was actually a concern I had decades ago, asking myself what happens if all these grants dry up. 

Some of our big pet projects are funded by state grant money, which are funded by federal grant money. An example is the heavy use of government grants regarding local water issues. 

What happens if the department in Washington DC originally providing the grant is dissolved or its projects curtailed? We don’t know what that means or what is going to happen within agencies. At this juncture it’s conjecture. 

We are starting to see some pictures of how we should be thinking and what we should be analyzing.

Don’t get into whether it’s right or wrong. At this moment we should be considering the possible what ifs. Set aside for a moment the heated rhetoric over the election and move on for a bit to think about the potential reality of what if. 

For example, we learned today that the federal Department of Education will be closed down and education will be handled exclusively at the state level. We’ve all gotten used to a federal Department of Education, since 1979 when President Carter started it.

For those in education, will there be any ramifications on a local Siskiyou County level? Are there federal education dollars ending up in Siskiyou, likely via Sacramento, that will disappear? Are educators starting to think in terms of how do we continue to give our Siskiyou County students a solid, quality education if certain funds dry up? Who should be having those pre-conversations regarding our kids’ education right now? 

Let’s start munching on some of these tough issues, as they are being announced, so we aren’t blindsided later on.

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