MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The State Board of Veterans Affairs Thursday asked Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs Commissioner Kent Davis to withdraw his resignation after a subcommittee said they found no wrongdoing with the $7 million that the Veterans Department had been allocated from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
“The State Board of Veterans Affairs today expressed full support for Commissioner Kent Davis as the head of the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs, which mirrors what the Veterans community across the state has echoed for more than five years,” the Alabama Department of Veterans Affairs Board said in a statement released by the department on Thursday. “Commissioner Davis remains focused in the department’s mission and day-to-day operations in its services to Alabama’s 400,000 Veterans.”
The move could potentially reignite a clash between Davis and Gov. Kay Ivey, who demanded Davis’ resignation in September after accusing him of delays in allocating the ARPA money that she said threatened the state’s ability to spend that money.
The governor, who spoke at the start of the meeting Thursday but left before the vote, accused the board of “orchestrated theater” in a statement Thursday afternoon. Ivey said it showed “a lack of leadership and quite the opposite of teamwork.”
“I have accepted Admiral Davis’ resignation, and I expect he will stand by his word,” the statement said. “We will move forward in exploring ways to best serve Alabama’s veterans.”
In a letter sent on Sept. 5, Ivey accused Davis failing to present applications for proposals funded through ARPA in a timely manner and of taking “actions to produce strife and conflict with my office, with other state executive-branch agencies, with state legislators, and with members of our congressional delegation.”
The governor’s office accused Davis of not presenting grant applications for mental health applications funded through ARPA until this January, just months before a June 1 deadline, which, she said, raised questions from other department heads about compliance and proper fund use.
The Alabama Department of Mental Health (ADMH) terminated a contract with Veterans’ Affairs in part due to these concerns. The Alabama Department of Finance later contacted Veterans Affairs with concerns about the grants, some of which the department said had little to no connection with veterans’ mental health.
Ivey wrote in September that the delays could have been fatal.
“They jeopardized the State’s ARPA obligations and very nearly prevented veterans service providers from receiving needed funds,” the letter said. “Moreover, your agency’s administrative problems distracted senior officials at other state agencies from their important work, as we worked quickly to reallocate the ARPA grant funds and find an alternate funding source for the grants.”
Davis later filed an ethics complaint against ADMH Commissioner Kim Boswell, accusing her and other department heads of conspiring to prevent Veterans Affairs from receiving the ARPA money. The Alabama Ethics Commission dismissed the complaint in August.
The commissioner initially refused to resign, saying the department had been “transparent” in the use of funds and did not jeopardize the state’s access to them. Ivey then called a meeting of the veterans board to remove Davis. Before the meeting took place, Davis met with Ivey and agreed to resign at the end of the year.
Brandon Miller, a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs, said Thursday that the Veterans Benefits and Services Committee, a subcommittee of the full board, requested an explanation of the timeline from Davis related to the ARPA funding a couple of weeks ago and provided the full report to the full board by Thursday’s meeting.
Miller also said the agency did not spend its ARPA funds.
“Everything was set up for the grant program to go into place, and a few different things happened where it got delayed, and we weren’t going to reach the June 1 deadline,” Miller said. “Once that reality was learned, we sent the money back to Finance to have the money redistributed to other agencies or other places that could use the funds.”
Veterans Affairs found an alternative source from within the agency to fund the initiatives in lieu of the ARPA money, according to Miller.
“We used some of our funding from the Veteran’s Assistance Fund, which is one of our internal funds, and we used $7 million out of it to then support the grant program, to make sure that those nonprofits and organizations still received the money that they earned and that they submitted for,” Miller said.
This article originally appeared on Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
