Gilbert, a town of Phoenix, doesn’t seem to have done much with the $24 million it got from the federal government for the pandemic.
It still has an empty plot of land where it plans to spend most of the money on a crime victims center. The latest government data shows that only a quarter of its funds are set aside for projects. But the town says that plans to spend the rest of the money should be ready soon.
Gilbert and thousands of other U.S. cities and towns have only a short time left to spend their $350 billion in COVID-19 relief funds, which were passed by Congress and President Joe Biden in 2021. By the end of this year, governments must use all of their American Rescue Plan funds for certain projects. If they don’t, they have to send the rest back to the U.S. Treasury.
The most current information sent to the Treasury by more than 26,500 local, state, and territorial governments shows that about 80% of all funds had been spent by March. That means you’ll finish on time.
A lot of work needs to be done by some countries, though.
An study by the Associated Press found that as of this spring, about 1 in 5 governments had spent less than half of their funds, and about 3,500 had spent less than 25%. There were 2,260 governments that said they had no projects, so it was not clear what they planned to do with the money. It’s possible that some of them have already spent the money but didn’t tell the federal government why.
The Treasury Department said it is reaching out to a lot of people to help them understand what they need to do to file their taxes.
Some Republicans and government watchdog groups have been critical of the American Rescue Plan from the start, saying that it allowed wasteful and excessive spending on things that had little to do with the coronavirus pandemic. But some state and local officials say the money has helped them do long-awaited projects they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.
Gilbert officials chose to spend almost all of their American Rescue Plan money on one project: a $43 million building where victims of sexual assault, child abuse, and domestic violence can get counseling and therapy as well as the forensic exams and interviews that are needed for prosecution.
A few years before the pandemic, officials knew they needed the center but didn’t have the money to build it. A little more than half of the cost will be paid for by government money. Gilbert’s general funds will pay the rest.
A “comprehensive wrap-around center where a victim of interpersonal violence can come and go on a really safe and healing journey” is what the goal is, said Assistant Town Manager Leah Rhineheimer. It’s “one of the most important things the town could do.”
Officials in the town want to award a construction contract this fall. This would meet the Treasury’s deadline of December 31 for using the money, but Gilbert Police Chief Michael Soelberg said that the real building wouldn’t begin until next year.
Treasury rules say that for a government to have a duty, it must usually buy goods or services, sign a contract, or give money to another group. If the government meets the obligation date, it has until the end of 2026 to finish spending the money.
The AP talked to other local officials who gave a variety of reasons for why they hadn’t reported using a lot of their funds. Some people said they didn’t need to explain how the money was spent because they saw it as making up for lost local income during the pandemic’s economic slump. Others said it was hard to figure out what to do with it.
A charity group in Washington, D.C., called Citizens Against Government Waste is led by Tom Schatz. “There’s no doubt that some of this money wasn’t needed and is being wasted.”
Dearborn Heights, a suburb of Detroit that got more than $24 million in federal aid, only mentioned one debt on its spring Treasury report: about $79,000 in administrative costs to choose and carry out projects that got federal aid.
Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi said that the government money came in soon after he took office, which made it hard to “get a grasp of what the city needs” and hire people to manage it at the same time. Some of the projects the city wants to pay for with the money are sewer, water main, and stormwater. Bazzi said that most of the money should be paid soon.
He said that work was held up because “we had to go through a tedious process” before putting jobs out to bid.
As the federal deadline draws near, some city and state governments are making extra plans to make sure they spend all the money.
Missouri told the Treasury this spring that it had already spent 99% of its nearly $2.7 billion amount. But some projects haven’t come together or don’t look like they’ll need all of their money.
So, lawmakers and Republican Gov. Mike Parson agreed to a new spending plan that got rid of $49 million that was supposed to go to COVID-19 response efforts and $16 million that was supposed to be used to, among other things, remodel an old mental health center so that it could be used as a sex offender rehabilitation program.
Those funds were moved to a lot of different projects, such as a college engineering building and a program to train health care workers.
As a backup plan in case other projects don’t get going, the Missouri Legislature also set aside $150 million from the American Rescue Plan for public schools in grades K–12. A number of conservative lawmakers from the Freedom Caucus voted “no,” saying they thought the government pandemic aid was making the federal debt and inflation go up.
The head of the Freedom Caucus, Republican state Sen. Rick Brattin, told the AP, “I’m fine if we were to give it back.” “At least we could hold our heads high and say that we didn’t keep doing things that made the American dollar’s value drop.”
Lincoln Hough, the Republican chairman of the Missouri Senate Appropriations Committee, said that lawmakers don’t have to agree with the federal money in order to use it.
“I believe that when we have the money, we should put it into our communities and our future workers,” Hough said.
There was a chance that some of Connecticut’s $2.8 billion American Rescue Plan amount would not be used, so this year the state General Assembly moved $365 million to different uses. The law also included a backup plan. It told the office of Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont to move any funds that don’t look like they will be needed by Oct. 15 to budget shortfalls and higher education instead.
As of this spring, the city of New Orleans had already spent 55% of its $387.5 million government allotment. But the money has been used quickly. Gilbert Montano, the chief administrative officer of New Orleans, said that as of September, 86% had been paid.
The City Council took pandemic relief funds away from a few projects that weren’t sure when they would be finished in the summer to pay for homeless shelters and clean up illegal dumps instead. Other projects that move more slowly are on a list of things that could be moved around before the end of the year.
Mongano said, “We’re not going to return any of that money.” “Too many needs.”