photo by: Journal-World

The west side of the Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St.

The deadline for Douglas County agencies to apply for American Rescue Plan Act funds is approaching, but the county says it’s still too early to tell just how many requests there might ultimately be.

Since March 17, the county has been accepting grant applications for the approximately $21 million in coronavirus relief funding it has left to allocate. That application window is now in its final days. The deadline to apply is Monday at 5 p.m.

But County Administrator Sarah Plinsky told the Journal-World in an email that as of Wednesday afternoon, the county hadn’t received many applications yet. Plinsky said that most applicants don’t actually submit their materials until the last minute, implying that the majority of applications would roll in Monday. She also stopped short of offering any specific information on applications from the agencies that have already applied — or details such as the exact volume of applications the county’s received or how much money those applicants are requesting in total — without sharing them with the Douglas County Commission first.

On that front, Plinsky said assuming everything stays on track, ARPA funding requests should appear on a commission agenda again in June.

That aligns with a tentative timeline presented to commissioners at their Feb. 16 meeting, which included a work session related to the ARPA fund distribution process. At that time, the calendar for the coming months targeted Wednesday, June 1 as the date county staff would provide recommendations to the commission, and June 15 and 22 as tentative dates for commissioners to take part in work sessions and ultimately make final decisions on how to allocate ARPA funding.

If that timeline holds true, county staff would have the entire month of May to review applications before presenting any recommendations on the first day of June.

The February work session was specifically about a period during which agencies could submit an informal letter of interest detailing projects that they might formally apply to have funded. That process resulted in informal requests from more than 100 agencies throughout the county, totaling nearly $77 million.

The Douglas County Commission talked about how it might go about narrowing down those requests back in February, as well. That included setting some loose criteria for the types of requests commissioners did and didn’t think would be viable. Commissioners agreed that projects which could be collaborations between multiple agencies filling similar needs would be an example of the type of request they’re looking for.

It’s still unclear, based on the county’s response ahead of the end of the application window, how the amount of funding requested through formal applications might compare to what was in those letters of interest, or which agencies will follow through with submitting formal applications.

However, notable letters of interest from earlier this year included a request from the Lawrence Community Shelter for more than $2 million to expand its capacity, as well as multiple requests from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, such as a large-scale reallocation of existing jail spaces to increase the facility’s functional capacity. That request didn’t specify an amount of funding, but the summary noted it would likely cost “more than $1 million.”