photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The Douglas County Commission is on the cusp of finalizing distribution of the county's remaining American Rescue Plan Act funding after the commission's Wednesday, June 29, 2022 meeting.

After several weeks of narrowing down requests for millions of dollars in American Rescue Plan Act funding, Douglas County leaders have a tentative plan for how to allocate the money and are on the cusp of distributing it to a number of agencies.

At its meeting on Wednesday, the commission directed county staff to prepare a finalized proposal for distributing the county’s roughly $21 million in remaining ARPA funds, and that proposal will be up for formal approval at the commission’s July 6 meeting. If the final proposal is approved, it will wrap up a yearlong process that started when the county received its ARPA funding on June 17, 2021.

“We appreciate so many community partners for spending time with us over the past couple weeks,” Commissioner Shannon Reid said. “Some of you have been with us more than once, and we appreciate that investment of time and how much effort and time you have put into all of these requests.”

Earlier this month, the commission had nearly 100 formal funding requests to consider, and they added up to more than four times the amount of ARPA funding the county had left to distribute. By the end of Wednesday’s meeting, the commission had narrowed that down to just 40 requests — 25 from internal county departments and 15 from nonprofits and other external organizations.

To help the commission narrow the applications down, county staff previously organized applications submitted by external agencies into tiers of priority. About a third of those requests were designated high priority based on the commission’s discussions throughout June, and every external request that is now on track to receive funding was from that group.

The commission also decided during earlier conversations about ARPA funding to dedicate around 33% of the money to internal requests for county projects. Some adjustments to line-item funding requests and the inclusion of around $1.6 million in ARPA funding that was previously set aside for emergency expenditures left the commission with $14,829,840 to work with for projects by nonprofits and other agencies that weren’t county departments.

By the end of Wednesday’s meeting, the commissioners had decided on how to allocate the last bits of that funding. They decided to allocate $3.3 million for Tenants to Homeowners to rehabilitate 29 existing supportive service housing units and build another 40 small homes; $190,750 to help Peaslee Tech expand its commercial driver’s license program; $305,000 toward a feasibility study for Central Grazing Company’s proposed Douglas County meat processing facility; and $426,405 in extra funding for the Community Children’s Center to purchase property to increase child care capacity, which commissioners had already decided to allocate $3.25 million toward.

The county’s behavioral health sales tax added another wrinkle to the conversation. County staff informed the commission that some of the proposed projects could be funded through the tax instead of through ARPA funds, and that there would be about $7.4 million in sales tax revenue available for that.

Three agencies that could be eligible for the sales tax funds — DCCCA, Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center and Artists Helping the Homeless — had representatives at Wednesday’s meeting to answer the commission’s questions about their proposals. Ultimately, commissioners expressed interest in using sales tax revenue to fund DCCCA’s request for $800,000 for transitional housing projects. That money would have to be allocated during the county’s upcoming budget process. Commissioners said the other two agencies’ requests needed more development, and they didn’t commit to providing any ARPA or sales tax funding for them.