In rural counties, pandemic money was used with suspicion

Moffat County, in northwest Colorado’s high country, and Cheyenne County, on the southeastern plains, show how the distribution and use of COVID-19 relief funds varied as much as the state’s geography.

Roughly $63 billion in aid from 22 major programs streamed into Colorado after the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020 and restrictions and shutdowns cascaded across the economy.

The economic impacts in Moffat and Cheyenne were different from communities along the Front Range or even neighboring counties, where tourism and skiing are big business and the economic shock waves first hit the hardest.

The Denver Post’s analysis of the billions in aid and tens of thousands in loans showed that Colorado’s rural counties, outside the mountain resort counties, received substantially less federal pandemic assistance, $7,202 per resident, than other areas. Resort counties, by contrast, received $11,652 per resident, while metro areas received  $9,574.

Both areas are rural, but Moffat, 35th in population out of 64 counties, was just 53rd in per capita funding at $6,832, or 39% below the state average, according to The Denver Post’s analysis. Cheyenne County, 59th in population, was seventh in per capita funding at $12,721, about 25% higher than the average per-resident amount.

Despite the differences in funding, the counties faced similar challenges in keeping on top of the assistance available. They didn’t necessarily have all the resources that public agencies and businesses had in more populous parts of the state.

“I know there were a lot of people who were really frustrated with the (Paycheck Protection Program) because it was confusing as to whether you even qualified,” said Jennifer Holloway, executive director of the Craig Chamber of Commerce.

In Moffat and Cheyenne counties, businesses deemed as essential and allowed to keep going during the pandemic — farming, ranching, coal mining, power plants, oil and gas — are among the cornerstone industries. Xcel Energy’s 229-turbine, 500 megawatt Cheyenne Ridge wind farm straddles Kit and Cheyenne counties.

Hunting and fishing, which thrive on social distancing, are also big draws in both regions. Moffat County, with almost 2 million acres of public land, is known nationally for its elk and deer herds. Hunting in the county generates about $12 million annually, according to a report by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

“What’s good about rural is we’re more open than the cities. Our six feet of social distancing is very easy to establish,” said Debbie Knudsen, the town clerk for Cheyenne Wells.

Businesses in Cheyenne, Kiowa and Kit Carson counties did well in obtaining PPP loans, but most rural counties, like Moffat, and especially Costilla and Crowley, lagged behind. Beyond having a smaller concentration of businesses, rural areas also tend to have more limited banking resources, which made it more difficult for borrowers to navigate the bureaucratic maze and get the help they needed.

Cheyenne County has a population of nearly 1,750 people and is 1,781 square miles in size, or about 1.1 million acres. Moffat County has a population of 13,283 and is 4,743 square miles, or roughly 3 million acres.

In some ways, the larger distances and fewer people allowed more locals to support each other, helping the areas weather the pandemic, residents said.

“We all work together and help each other,” Knudsen said. “We support our businesses here because it’s important.”

Still, local businesses didn’t close and scale back to the extent they did in other parts of the state, Moffat County Commissioner Melody Villard said. “We were impacted, but I don’t think in the same way as some other areas of the state because we’re sparsely populated.”

The businesses and organizations that were affected got support from locals who likely grew up with the business owners or know them from crossing paths in the same community, she added.

“We rallied around neighboring businesses and found ways to still support them even if they weren’t able to be open,” Villard said.

However, as the county emerges from the pandemic’s economic fallout, another disruption is looming that will have “a much bigger impact for potentially a longer time on our revenues,” Villard said.

The three units of the Craig Station coal-fired power plant and a mine that supplies it will shut down over the next few years as utilities and the state try to meet goals for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. The closures will affect about 700 direct high-paying jobs and support businesses, on top of phasing out a major source of local property tax revenue.

Banking on community

Although Cheyenne County is one of Colorado’s least populated counties, it received the third-highest amount in money per capita through the Paycheck Protection Program. Greg Weed, CEO of Cheyenne Wells-based Eastern Colorado Bank, said his staff worked hard on reaching out to area businesses.

“We’re a small community bank. That’s what we do,” said Weed, whose grandparents started the bank in 1944.

A substantial number of the more than 240 small PPP loans arranged by area banks went to farms and ranches. “We tried really hard to see that no one was missed,” Weed said.

More area farmers and ranchers qualified for the loans in the second round after the guidelines were changed. The money provided farmers with the help they needed during the worst part of the pandemic, Weed added. The loans are forgiven if a majority of the money is spent on payroll.

Two PPP loans of $11,747 each helped “tremendously,” said Stan Wells, who owns OYO Hotel Cheyenne Wells on U.S. 40. Both the pandemic and the departure of some oil industry workers led to a lull in business.

The hotel, formerly known as the Trail Inn Motel, also serves as a domestic violence resource and mental health respite, Wells added. While it’s been a struggle to make ends meet, the hotel is now often 75% full, with business looking up, he said.

Mitchek Farms GP in Kit Carson received a $12,641 loan in April 2020, with another one for $21,250 taken out by Ervin Mitchek, who runs the business with two relatives, in February 2021. Daughter Debbie Mitchek, who works as the secretary, acknowledged that the money was a help, then summed up a feeling prevalent in the heavily Republican county: “None of us are big government people.”

The younger Mitchek said in a telephone interview that she still believes “the government should have done none of it.”

Megan Wendt said the PPP loans she and her husband, Derek, got for their oilfield services company allowed them to keep many of their employees when demand plummeted. Still, Wendt, who also runs a cattle operation and a propane business in Cheyenne Wells, said she is a bit wary of the “free” money given out during the pandemic.

“It is a good thing to a certain extent, but who knows where it will come back to bite you in the years to come,” Wendt said. “We applied and followed the requirements. That’s all we can do.”

Wendt and Sons Oilfield Service, which works primarily in North Dakota, received PPP loans of $498,486 and $465,500. The Wendts didn’t apply for assistance for their other businesses.

Concerns about strings attached to the federal aid caused the town of Cheyenne Wells to hold off on spending it. Knudsen, the town clerk, said the town will receive $208,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money. The aid will go toward upgrading five of the town’s water wells to the latest state standards.

“If we spent it the wrong way, there was fear that we’d have to pay it back. So, they held onto it,” Knudsen said.

Funding the front lines

“We have not forgotten” those who’ve died, said Cheyenne County Public Health Agency Director Kelli Adamson. “Our hearts continue to break.”

Adamson, who described Cheyenne as a “small, technically frontier” county, said each death “was felt incredibly deep by not just the families, but every neighbor, church friend, grocery store attendant.”

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment puts the county’s total number of COVID-19 cases at 321, confirming nine deaths among those. Health care providers in Cheyenne County and across the state received millions of dollars to respond to the pandemic that filled hospitals early on and in subsequent surges of the virus.

The Keefe Memorial Health Service District received $2.94 million from the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Provider Relief Fund through the Health Resources and Services Administration. Keefe Memorial Hospital in Cheyenne Wells, with clinics in Prairie View and Kit Carson, secured another $103,253.

A portion of the money was used for bonuses and other measures to retain employees, hospital spokeswoman Shannon Borders said. The hospital and clinics also hired more staff to handle the influx of patients.

Keefe Memorial Hospital also spent the money on technology to help care for COVID-19 patients, such as portable and stationary digital imaging, laboratory equipment and supplies providing rapid test results, Borders said.

“Over 150 miles separates KMH from the Denver metro area, so these upgrades allow our providers to care for patients who may not otherwise have access to health care,” she said in an email. “We have successfully helped patients recover from COVID in the comfort of their hometown.”

The Cheyenne County Public Health Agency received about $685,207 to support a broad range of COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 testing “and epidemiologic surveillance-related activities.” Adamson said the agency received an additional $125,881 in COVID-specific immunization funds.

The hospital in Craig, Memorial Regional Health, didn’t see its first big COVID caseload until around October 2020, when cases in other parts of the state began to decline.

“That’s when hunting season gets really ramped up here, so there were a lot more people in the community. That’s when we really started to see a spike,” said Jennifer Riley, the hospital’s chief operating officer and interim CEO. “Our hospital was very full.”

The hospital was also short-staffed because employees fell ill. A second wave occurred in the fall of 2021, keeping the hospital busy through the holidays. State data show Moffat County with a total of 2,999 cases and 41 deaths due to COVID-19.

At one point, Moffat County’s positivity rate — the percentage of all coronavirus tests that are positive — was among the highest in the country, she added. The hospital and health providers dealt with resistance to the vaccines and masks. Riley said the county’s vaccination rate is about 50%.

“The vaccine mandate definitely started to erode the staff,” Riley said. “Craig is very conservative and that translates to our workforce as well.”

She figures that 25 to 30 employees ended up leaving because of the vaccine mandate. Others retired early, took jobs as visiting nurses or left health care because of COVID. Memorial Regional Health has about 360 employees and currently has 80 job postings on its website.

Riley said, early in the pandemic, the hospital’s former CEO Andy Daniels could see that most elective services would likely be halted to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Daniels and other rural hospital representatives succeeded in getting approval to continue those services and elective surgeries — what Riley called “our lifeblood of support” — at critical-access hospitals.

The critical-access designation is by Medicare and typically applies to hospitals whose volumes might be low, but provide a safety net for rural areas. Memorial Regional Health’s ability to offer elective services helped offset the losses when visits to the clinics and emergency room dropped, Riley said.

The federal money that the hospital received includes $5.5 million from Health and Human Services, about $3 million in PPP money and $986,000 in American Rescue Plan Act dollars.

The Craig hospital also received $7.3 million in Medicare accelerated payments, which are paid back over a number of years by using the money for future claims. Riley said the hospital has set the money aside in case of an emergency, but otherwise will use it for Medicare expenses.

Overcoming disadvantages

Anna Lighthizer and her aunt opened their business, The Sizzling Pickle Restaurant and Lounge, in a new location in Craig in November 2020, “as scary and crazy as that sounds.” The pandemic was in full force, and they didn’t renew their management agreement with the bowling alley where they started the restaurant.

Lighthizer received a $10,000 grant from the city to help make it through the tough spots, but missed out on other opportunities because she didn’t know about them or was uncertain about the requirements. The restaurant added seating to a patio when inside seating was restricted, offered delivery and curbside service and got by with a lot of support from the community.

“The community definitely came together, and they made sure they ordered from us. I was trying to patronize smaller restaurants in town,” Lighthizer said. “We’re all out for that same bread and butter, but we’re all in it together, too.”

Andrea Camp and her husband, Dale, along with another couple, bought the West Twin Cinema in Craig in 2019. After remodeling the building, they opened for business in December 2019. Soon, COVID-19 started spreading.

“We barely had just gotten the doors open and had just gotten the business back up and running and ended up being closed down in March of 2020,” Camp said.

The movie theater got a $10,000 grant from the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media, a $5,883 loan through the federal Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Advances program and $25,000 in grants from the city.

“Honestly, it really has made the difference in us being able to keep the doors open,” Camp said. “Our operating expenses are relatively high, with having to do social distancing and limited capacity and restrictions.”

Camp said the theater owners thought it was important to keep the business open “and not have another empty building” sitting downtown.

For City Manager Peter Brixius , keeping the establishments open in Craig, which has about 9,000 people, was a priority.

“In a small community, you can’t really afford to see many of those businesses go belly up,” Brixius said.

The city used roughly $642,000 of its $2.85 million in federal relief funds to support local businesses. The city added $170,000 from its general fund.

Brixius said the city is now looking at what it can do to address a shortage of affordable housing in Craig and some of the labor shortages that have become a widespread problem during the pandemic. Some of the relief funds will help with training for new police officers.

Moffat County School District RE-1 was like school districts across Colorado and the nation when the pandemic hit: scrambling to figure out how to keep students and employees safe while ensuring instruction continued. They sent kids home with iPads, came up with lesson plans and applied for the federal relief money that would help keep everything rolling and employees on the payroll.

However, there were differences for the Moffat County district because of its small staff and remote location. Employees checked on students to make sure they had access to the internet. In some cases, people went to school to download material and district employees set up wireless hotspots for homes.