would give us a solid A-,” was the response given by Robyn Hyden, executive director of Alabama Arise, when asked by TVLR host Jacob Morrison on last week’s show how she would grade Alabama’s expenditure of the ARPA funding. “Especially for [the second] round of funding.”

Her take may come as a surprise given the Alabama government’s notoriously questionable reputation as far as how they spend major funding.

“If you have to grade them on round one of ARPA, I think that was a solid D,” she clarified, referring to the first COVID relief package, some of which Alabama almost immediately spent unnecessarily on expanding the prison system. “We are not the only state that took that money and immediately put it towards prisons and jails, and I think that is just a really sad statement on our priorities as a state, and as a country. I think that was a missed opportunity.”

But Hyden went on to explain what the state did right with the second round of spending. “When you look at the other items that were funded in general… the fact that the legislature said, ‘we’ve gotta get together and put our egos aside [and] have some consensus’? It is a shocking amount of money, and there are billions and billions of other dollars that have been appropriated without even any legislative approval or oversight… So the amount of funds that have been going into our state economy — to provide relief, to boost pay for state employees, to boost pay for child care workers, to boost pay for home care workers — all of that was done without a lot of legislative complaining or bellyaching about ‘federal funding,’ and that’s pretty amazing.”

Watch the full interview with Robyn Hyden for more information on how exactly Alabama spent the ARPA funding:

Joe Harrison is graphic designer and video producer for The Valley Labor Report, as well as an orchestral composer. Having a long history with self-centered, manipulative, and abusive employers, he joined TVLR in November 2021 in an effort to raise awareness of worker struggles and the severe imbalance of power in the workplace and the nation as a whole.