The end of the year marks a key deadline for local governments that received pandemic-era money from the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021. Officials have until Dec. 31 to declare how they plan to use the money, or they must return any amount not used.
Not only has Allen County met that deadline, the county also has spent all of the $2.4 million it was awarded. The final payment was made in September, County Clerk Shannon Patterson said.
The money allowed Allen County to complete high-dollar projects — including a communications tower, storm shelters, and water and airport infrastructure projects — that officials hope will benefit the area for decades to come and lead to future economic development. They also leveraged the money as matching funds for grants, increasing the scope of the projects.
Since the pandemic, the county received nearly $8 million from recovery programs and a state grant. That’s not counting ARPA funds for individual cities.
“I think we made good use of that money,” Allen County Commission Chair David Lee said.
Commissioner Jerry Daniels agreed. “If those kinds of funds are available, you want to fight for your county and do the best you can with it. In that timeframe, post-COVID, there were a lot of unknowns but we tried to do as many good things as we could. It took a lot of cooperation. Projects that big take every spoke in the wheel.”
THE AMERICAN Rescue Plan was passed in March 2021 to provide $1.9 trillion through various programs aimed at helping the country recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier, in 2020, Allen County received $2.4 million through the Strengthening People and Revitalizing Kansas (SPARK) funding program, with only about six months to spend the money. That money primarily helped local businesses during the worst months of the pandemic and paid for such things as protective equipment, masks, security measures at schools and grants for small businesses. 
A second round of funding under ARPA brought another $2.4 million directly to the county in 2022, with smaller amounts to individual cities. That second round of funding gave local leaders more than two years to decide how to best use the money, with the deadline to allocate the money by this coming Tuesday. They have until Dec. 31, 2026, to spend it.
In August 2022, the county hired Thrive Allen County to administer the ARPA program, at a cost of $96,101, or 4% of the total ARPA grant. Thrive CEO Lisse Regehr said she believes the experience with SPARK offered a blueprint to follow.
“One of the things I’m most proud of was how, in the midst of COVID, we were able to bring together all sectors — business, social services, child care, educational institutions and governmental agencies — to put together a steering committee and make sure everyone had a voice at the table on how to spend those funds,” she said. “It was one of the most intense things we’ve ever had to do.”
When it came to the second round of funding, the goal was to fund projects that would benefit the county on a larger scale.
“With the first round, we were in more of a reactive mode,” Regehr said. “The second tranche was more about how to look forward and prepare to become stronger.”
Regehr said Thrive promised commissioners “to find a way to make your money go further.” As a result, Thrive and the county secured a $2.9 million Building a Stronger Economy (BASE) grant from the Kansas Department of Commerce for infrastructure improvements at the Allen County Regional Airport. The county used ARPA money to meet its 25% match requirement, or $965,174.06.
Altogether, the county received $2.4 million from SPARK, another $2.4 million from ARPA and $2.9 million from the BASE grant for a total of $7.7 million.
