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GREENSBORO — The city would hire a lobbyist to help land money from the federal government under a plan floated by Greensboro City Manager Rashad Young.

A majority of council members  at a briefing session Tuesday responded favorably to the plan, saying the estimated $60,000 to $80,000 annual cost would be worth the investment if it could bring in millions in untapped federal dollars.

“They help us navigate the federal bureaucracy in terms of getting the kind of support we need,” Young said.

Hundreds of federal programs help cities pay for everything from building roads and providing affordable housing to buying fire trucks and hiring police officers.

If the City Council follows through, this figures to be one of the few areas of expansion in next year’s city budget. Greensboro faces an $11.2 million shortfall that council members want to close without raising taxes.

Greensboro already pays a lobbyist to keep tabs on business at the General Assembly in Raleigh.

Other North Carolina cities, including High Point, have federal lobbyists. Officials there have credited their roughly $120,000 annual lobbying investment with landing millions in grants and smoothing talks with federal regulators.

But at least one Greensboro City Council member is not convinced. “How are we going to know for $60,000 or $80,000 what they are doing down there?” Trudy Wade asked . “It would have to be a little more formalized. I would have to know what $80,000 was going for.”

Although lobbyists have a reputation as wheelers and dealers who  bend lawmakers to their will, a municipal lobbyist’s work is often more mundane. By and large, municipal lobbyists make their money tracking key pieces of legislation, reading federal regulations and interpreting complicated requests for grant proposals put out by federal agencies.

Assistant City Manager Denise Turner said Wednesday that any contract with a lobbying firm would include performance measures and the ability to end the deal if payback wasn’t quick enough.

“We’d expect that any lobbyist would pay for themselves in the first year,” Turner said.

Turner has handled some federal lobbying work for the city but said she cannot provide the same level of service as someone who works full-time in Washington  .

Turner said she and Young hoped the council might include a lobbyist in the new budget so the lobbyist could start working in August.

Council members also seemed interested in working with a group such as the Greensboro Partnership to jointly hire a lobbyist, either through a firm or as a directly paid staff member.

“Our greatest need is to build a program that looks at what resources are available in appropriations and grants,” Turner said.

That squares with what those who represent the city at the U.S. Capitol say: City officials have ready access to representatives and senators.

When asked if the city needed a lobbyist, U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan said that was a decision that the council needed to make for itself. But she added that her office meets with “communities from all over our great state, which I do every day.”

Ed McDonald,  U.S. Rep. Howard Coble’s chief of staff, said access isn’t the issue. “You don’t need to hire an outside firm to work with our office,” he said.

However, lobbying firms have been useful for cities that wanted to find grants and other pots of money tucked away in the federal budget.

“They can identify those programs here in Washington for which a city might be eligible,” McDonald said. “We don’t have the resources or the time in this office to go through the entire federal budget to see what might be a good fit for, say, the City of Greensboro.”

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com

Contact Amanda Lehmert at 373-7075 or amanda.lehmert@news-record.com