Navajo County is ready for the New Year and preparing for important infrastructure changes.
County Manager Glenn Kephart said, “This should be an exciting year for Navajo County, not only from an organizational standpoint but our county as a whole. One of the keys to that is some of the things that happened this last year.”
Specifically, Kephart was speaking about the upcoming broadband projects that are county-wide. As recently reported by The Tribune, the county has begun the application process for several federal grants to help fund construction of broadband infrastructure. One of those applications is for a grant from the Arizona Commerce Authority of $10 million per project. Kephart explained that money, if awarded, would help fund the building of a broadband network that will benefit all county stakeholders.
Also on the table for the coming year is how to move forward with using the $21.5 million allocated to the county by the federal government through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
Kephart explained, “We need to spend that money by 2026 and we are excited about that. Over the past year, we have been meeting with our Board of Supervisors about this. They have established a goal to identify and remove barriers that limit positive and healthy growth in our community. They also gave us some guiding principles to follow which make sure that projects we are proposing are sustainable and have a lasting positive effect on our county.”
According to Kephart those principles included avoiding programs that lack long term sustainability. He said, “We don’t want to start something that won’t be able to support itself, say, 10 years down the road. We will also be leveraging federal and state funding sources where possible, and we will partner with our communities and non-profits in the region to focus on projects and programs that benefit the region.”
He said, “It is really that regional development of services that define our looking ahead for the year. Under the guiding principles, we reached out to the towns and cities and non-profits and everybody and asked what projects they had that met the principles.”
Kephart said, “Rochelle (Lacapa, County Economic Development Director and Government Relations Director) had a great deal to do with designing a vetting process to make sure projects would be eligible for federal funding. Through that, we looked at regional development and services and saw that the key categories that we will be moving forward with were broadband, public health, economic development, public safety communications and enhanced county service delivery. There are specifics behind those categories, but I would be getting out ahead of things if I mentioned them here. We will bring proposals to our Board of Supervisors beginning this month and they will begin prioritizing. By the end of January, we should see things beginning to happen with the ARPA funding. We are going to make changes that will benefit our children and grandchildren, not just quick changes for today.”
Lacapa joined the conversation to discuss economic development in the upcoming calendar year. She said, “We are looking at how to work with members of Real AZ to make their economic development goals and how that will fit into what the county is looking at in terms of attracting and retaining businesses. We will also continue working with our partners to move forward their strategies around broadband. We will be taking a hard look at the work force, housing and recruitment and retention in the area.”
She continued, “Real AZ is a regionally focused organization that covers Navajo and Apache counties, excluding our Tribal neighbors. We recognize that being as rural as we are, individually we are not able to attract larger businesses independently but if we work as a region, we become much more attractive to larger business.”
Kephart also expressed his gratitude for the Navajo County Public Health District. He said, “Under the leadership of Janelle (Lin, Public Health Director), they have really done an amazing job over the last two years of helping us navigate this COVID pandemic. As we head into the New Year, and still facing this, I have no doubt they will continue their excellent work with contact tracing and other mitigation strategies. Public Health will continue to be a priority for us.”
Navajo County as an organization will continue to focus on customer service as well as the safety of staff and customers. Throughout the pandemic, they have been able to adapt, as Kephart explained, “To maintaining services for our county residents as well as making sure we are being responsible.”
He concluded, “We are very excited about 2022 and we will see some great progress and growth this year.”
