LOCAL WEED AND SEED GROUP MAY GET MONEY BACK

Southeast Missouri Weed and Seed may be getting its money back soon, but not every organization connected to it will.

As Weed and Seed's regional board met Thursday in anticipation of having its funding restored, it made clear that money already spent by groups expecting to be reimbursed by the board wasn't going to be available.

Money spent by some Cape Girardeau churches in food programs for children this summer will not be paid by Weed and Seed funds, although the churches were told they would.

That means that New Horizons and Greater Dimensions churches will have to recoup losses of about $1,500 somewhere else.

"You had hungry children coming back for food to church ladies," said Debra Hamilton, a coordinator for Weed and Seed in Cape Girardeau. "How could they have turned them away?"

Many of the children had come back for seconds, which drove up the costs of the state-funded $2.13 meals, Hamilton said.

"When you knew that they probably wouldn't get anything more to eat until the next day, you couldn't refuse them," she said.

The board's intention has not been to fund food programs, said Rick Hetzel, Cape Girardeau police chief and a board member.

"We shouldn't have to subsidize a program with other money designated for other sources," said Caruthersville Mayor Diane Sayre, a board member.

The board, which unites five Southeast Missouri cities in an effort to combat crime and create grassroots social changes, lost its funding from the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month. One of the reasons cited for freezing the grant money was inappropriate expenditures, such as money used to pay for food.

According to the stipulations of the grant, money must be spent within a narrow range approved in the program's strategy.

The food program had originally been approved by the regional Weed and Seed board, with the idea that it would be paid for from a U.S. Department of Agriculture program.

But when the funding couldn't pay for all that the children were eating, the Cape Girardeau Weed and Seed steering committee made plans to draw funds from a mini-grant through the regional board, Hamilton said. It would pay for what the USDA couldn't, she said.

This idea was approved by the local steering committee a week or so before SEMO Weed and Seed's funding was cut off, she said.

"If we had known that we couldn't use Weed and Seed money, we would have looked elsewhere sooner," Hamilton said.

On Thursday, the board rejected a request to use some of the $50,000 that each city contributed from its general fund to reimburse the churches.

Now Hamilton is seeking to make up the lost money through charitable organizations in Cape Girardeau.