State Auditor Julie Blaha said federal relief dollars helped cushion the economic blow of the pandemic. (Anthony Soufflé, Star Tribune file/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

State Auditor Julie Blaha could hardly envision a global pandemic posing once-in-a-century challenges when she launched her now-annual "State of Main Street" studies of local government financial health three years ago.

Last week's release provided the state's first look at how federal pandemic relief dollars helped cushion the economic blow of the pandemic's 2020 onset while highlighting local responses to a crisis that was global in nature.

"You saw local governments respond to a global pandemic and be able to pull off some amazing things in record time, record complexity and record volume," Blaha said in an interview after the report's release. "All while their cat is walking across their keyboard because they had to work from home."

This year's State of Main Street was in part the product of five listening sessions around the state and used 20-year local government financial trends to contextualize the 2020 data. That was important to understand the effect of the federal CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act relief money on local governments around the state.

Blaha pulled together staff, local elected leaders and the head of a Big Lake nonprofit to present the findings last week during a hybrid in-person and virtual address at the State Capitol.

Brenda Geldert, executive director of Options, Inc., a Big Lake nonprofit that helps people with developmental and intellectual disabilities find work and shelter, described how preexisting connections with her surrounding governments helped keep her organization afloat.

With Options' financial resources strained, Geldert said city, county and township leaders reached out to include her in their CARES grant applications. It encouraged her staff, she said, to believe that hope was not lost.

"More importantly for us is that they all expressed just that golden part of humanity: their desire to protect the most vulnerable in their communities," Geldert said.

Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley said that there was "no way counties could have survived without the additional support" and that CARES dollars were used to buy hotels to make sure the unsheltered could stay safe.

Blaha sought to spotlight local governments' work balancing the needs of keeping up with public health and infrastructure demands while also managing economic challenges unique to each community.

She said she is now working to get the State of Main Street findings into the hands of Minnesota's congressional delegation to underscore the difference that federal relief money made while also making the case for not abandoning local governmental funding in the future.

Other recommendations from her report include customizing crisis responses to each community and building collaborative connections like that of Options, Inc., and its surrounding communities well before a crisis emerges. She also urges "memorializing" local pandemic responses for future study.

"These things all look different around the state," Blaha said. "Sometimes we can mistake the need for customization for geographic division."