The $4.3 million that the City of Lathrop will soon receive as part of its share of the current round of pandemic relief funds will help make the city whole.

With the city currently receiving about 20 percent less sales tax revenue than it would in a normal year, and Measure C proceeds coming in more than $600,000 below where they were a year ago, the funding – which the city is still waiting to receive – will be used to backfill existing revenue shortfalls and expenditures that the city has already made for COVID compliance and protection.

According to City Manager Steve Salvatore, the city has spent over $1 million on the pandemic response – not including the more than $560,000 in economic development funding that went out to small businesses that needed help in keeping their doors open.

Without those small business grants, said Lathrop’s Administrative Services Director Cari James, there would have been local businesses that had to close their doors for good.

“In one of the grants that I delivered the owners said that they were just getting ready to close their doors and that this funding would help keep them open for a few more months,” James said. “With that funding coming around Christmas, I think that it helped our local businesses a lot.

“There were a lot of things that they had to buy in order to operate outdoors – picnic stuffs and tents and the like – and even the to-go containers were an expense that many small businesses weren’t expecting.”

The majority of the city’s expenditures came early in the pandemic when around-the-clock staffing was necessary, and a robust emergency operations center was set up to help address the response – something that has since been scaled back as the city and its stakeholders have learned more about how to effectively respond to the needs of citizens.

But the unexpected expenditures coupled with the reduction in sales tax revenue has forced the city to find creative ways to meet the demands that the pandemic brought without tapping too heavily into general fund reserves.

As a way to help stop the bleeding for local small businesses, Lathrop tapped into a longstanding fund intended to spur economic development that was created to offset the impacts from residential growth in the Stewart Tract area if it were to begin without a large amusement park in place first.

In all, Lathrop distributed more than $500,000 from that fund to help small businesses – in addition to more than $1 million in early funding to help organize the pandemic response and not including the $600,000 difference in Measure C revenue that the city received in the 2019/20 fiscal year when compared to the pervious 12 months.

Things like additional cleaning protocols for local parks, additional supplies to keep staff and the general public safe, and items needing to be purchased in order to comply with the ever-changing State guidelines for safe operations also required expenditures that weren’t initially planned for.

While Lathrop received funding from the initial CARES Act disbursement, the roughly $311,000 wasn’t enough to cover the expenses that the city had incurred.

While Measure C revenue is expected to be even lower for the 2020/21 fiscal year than the previous year, Lathrop has attempted to curb that by reducing the amount of spending that it does from that fund so that the city doesn’t have to tap into additional revenue sources to meet the ongoing obligations that Measure C provides to the city – including funding for police and fire personnel.

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.