A version of this story first appeared in Talk of the Town, a free weekly newsletter of local stories that dig deep, unique events and natural beauty from north-central PA’s communities. Sign up at spotlightpa.org/newsletters/talkofthetown.
STATE COLLEGE — Governments of all sizes across the United States are nearing the deadline to commit pandemic relief funding from the federal government. As more comprehensive information on how tens of thousands of entities have used the public dollars is released, parsing the funds’ final destinations and impacts still takes some work.
The funding, authorized as a part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, gave an unprecedented amount of aid to about 31,000 state, county, city, tribal, territorial and local governments.
“I make the argument that we probably haven’t seen this level of funding coming to localities like this, really, in our lifetime,” City of Williamsport Council President Adam Yoder told Spotlight PA.
The majority of the recipients — more than 26,000 — are small local governments, a U.S. Treasury official told Spotlight PA in an email. Many of them have never received federal funding before, and the lack of familiarity with grant procedures can add to the administrative burden, the official said.
In Pennsylvania, 2,556 of these smaller municipalities received a total of $1.21 billion. They are referred to as Tier 5 entities under the program, a definition that comes with less frequent reporting requirements.
Each recipient of the pandemic relief funds reports to the U.S. Treasury how much funding they have obligated or committed to a specific order or contract, and under which category of permissible uses the dollars are spent. The public can access this information on dashboards maintained by the Treasury.
Follow these steps:
- Determine which dashboard contains the latest information for the government you’re interested in. Because of different reporting requirements, the latest available data for Tier 1 and 2 recipients — the commonwealth as well as the more populated counties and cities — includes funding obligated by the end of July. Use the July 2024 Reporting Dashboard on the page. For smaller local governments, which are Tier 5, use the April 2024 Reporting Dashboard. (About 84% of Pennsylvania’s Tier 5 municipalities met the reporting deadline and are included in the Treasury database.)
- Using the “Recipients” tab, filter and search for the government unit you’re interested in. You can see the total allocation for each recipient, the amount of projects they submitted and other details.
- Using the “Projects” tab, you can look up details of each project, including funding amount, description and status.
Among the 2,140 Tier 5 units in Pennsylvania included in the April report, nearly two-thirds used their entire allocation for revenue replacement, according to a Spotlight PA analysis. Revenue replacement includes salaries and benefits of public employees, upgrades to government technology and facilities and costs of maintaining or building infrastructure.
The U.S. Treasury designed this category to be the least administratively burdensome, with smaller municipalities in mind, said Amanda Kass, a DePaul University assistant professor who studies this funding program.
But Kass said the ease of reporting also means it’s harder to track specific impacts of the funding.
Take Elk County, which has obligated $3,448,509 toward three projects, according to the April dashboard. Each project included an identical description, “Revenue Replacement under 6.1 ‘Provision of Government Services.’”
But the county has planned and implemented more comprehensive projects than the description suggests. One example is Elk County’s ongoing development of a new, permanent 911 radio tower, which was caught in the middle of a private land dispute earlier this year.
The county is working on identifying a new location for the tower ahead of the critical obligation deadline at the end of this year, Elk County Chief Clerk Pat Straub told Spotlight PA in an email. The county is also entering into two multiyear projects using the funding, and expects to spend all its pandemic relief allocation according to the program timeline. Spotlight PA has submitted a Right-to-Know request for details of those plans, which the county has not shared.
Because there’s a delay in when the U.S. Treasury receives data from governments, members of the public need to do some work if they want the most up-to-date information on how their local governments are using pandemic relief funds.
Pennsylvanians can submit open records requests to public agencies for details. Ask for an itemized listing of projects your municipality funded with the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds could be a good start.
A combination of the U.S. Treasury dashboards and Pennsylvania’s open records law can present a fuller picture of how ARPA funding is working in your community.
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