Clayton County is looking for a way to use grants to pay for local needs that would ordinarily come out of the south metro Atlanta community’s general fund.
The county is considering a contract with California-based eCivis that Clayton leaders hope will help them access a bigger pool of grants. The additional funds could be used for everything from infrastructure improvements to rent assistance.
“Our current and temporary, and I say temporary for a reason, grant portfolio is $80 million,” Celeste Hollis-Singleton, senior grants analyst for the Clayton Office of Performance Management, told the Clayton County Board of Commissioners in pitching eCivis as a partner. “If you take out the $67 million that is ARPA and CARES, our grant portfolio is only $14 million.”
ECivis, which launched in 2000, is a grant application partner with the cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles, according to its website.
Singleton said Clayton applied for about 29 grants in 2019 and was approved for 25 of them.
“That’s a great number but I focus on why we did not receive those four,” she said. “Were we not in compliance at the time of searching for those grants? Did we go out and seek grants that are not fit for us. We don’t know.”
She said with eCivis the county could better track grants and how well Clayton is doing in winning them.
Commissioner Felicia Franklin said grants are important, but expressed concern about buying yet another system that is supposed to make government work better.
She said it would be more constructive to determine the needs of all departments and seek software that is universal instead of specific to only one part.
“This county spent a lot of money on a system years ago and yet we have to buy another system,” Franklin said. “We were told years ago those various systems would allow us to be able to manage what was brought before us tonight.”
It is unclear when the commission will vote on a contract with eCivis.
