Council debates rules for financial partners, Mayfield urges strict scoring and limited ARPA use

Charlotte City Council members spent most of a budget-adjustment session examining how to apply the city's recently adopted Financial Partners policy and whether to use unallocated ARPA revenue replacement to expand nonprofit grants.

Councilmember LaWanna Mayfield, who led a re-review of 51 applicants, told colleagues she and Strategy & Budget staffer Marie Harris used two basic criteria to trim requests: whether an applicant's requested city funding exceeded 30 percent of the organization's budget and whether the organization scored at or above an average for its category. "The red is saying these are the organizations that did not meet either or both of the initial criteria," Mayfield said, explaining why some groups were removed from her recommended list.

Mayfield proposed adding about $444,430 in extra funding to the manager's recommended financial partners list by applying those two criteria and re-running category averages; that would raise the total recommended financial-partner allocation in her packet from the…