Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a three-part series on how Knox County spent its COVID-19 relief funds.
MOUNT VERNON — Eight months after allocating the county’s $12.2 million in COVID-19 relief funds, County Administrator Jason Booth said that locally, the program worked.
“Obviously, this was an incredible amount of tax dollars that were divided out throughout the country,” he said.
“I think there are varying (opinions) on whether people thought it should have happened or or not, but once the money was received locally, I feel like we really identified issues or areas that were important to the community. We addressed those using these funds.”
President Joe Biden signed the act into law on March 11, 2021. Local governments were to use the money to help communities respond to or recover from the effects of COVID-19 under these general criteria:
•Replace lost revenue
•Respond to or mitigate the public health emergency or its negative economic impacts
•Increased pay for essential workers
•Invest in water, sewer, and broadband infrastructure
•Equity-focused services
Allocating the COVID-19 relief money
The county received $6,102,659 in June 2021 and the remaining $6,102,659 in June 2022.
“At the beginning, we really honed in on water and sewer infrastructure and then, addressing economic impacts,” Booth said. “We did not pay for workers; we didn’t allocate money back for payroll or any of that kind of stuff.”
Booth tracked the county’s ARPA spending by category:
•Community support
•County engineer infrastructure
•County facilities infrastructure
•Water/wastewater infrastructure
Booth said that “right out of the gate,” the commissioners identified several projects that were good because current and future citizens would benefit.
“Obviously, future citizens are going to be paying for this money. So that really was our focus. Future taxpayers will help bear the burden of the repayment, so let’s do some projects that future taxpayers will benefit from,” he said.
“Those are really what we classified as generational projects.”
Ultimately, the county distributed money across the health, child care, business, homelessness, and infrastructure sectors.
The distribution process
Booth said that when the county knew the funds were coming, the commissioners asked Water and Wastewater Superintendent Jeff Pickrell to identify projects.
“The commissioners and I worked with him and vetted that down to the ones we thought would have the biggest impact with the dollars we had,” he said.
The commissioners also reached out to the villages. Danville initially considered a county water project. Centerburg officials thought about using the funds to address stormwater problems.
However, both municipalities chose different routes to resolve those issues.
Fredericktown pooled its ARPA funds with the county’s contribution for two projects.
As the commissioners identified projects, Booth encumbered them on a spreadsheet, keeping a running tally of how much was left to disburse.
For other entities that requested help, Booth said it was a little bit of “who gets to the table first.”
“We held some funds back because we knew something would come forward, but once a good project was identified, we basically committed to it. We locked it in because it was their money, and we knew that money was, in a sense, gone,” he said.
“I don’t really feel like we had too much at the end where people wanted money that we didn’t have.”
Toward the end of the distribution process, Booth allocated whatever was left to the county engineer’s office.
“I’m sure everybody wishes there would have been more, but me, I was ready to be done,” Booth said with a smile.
“But I don’t think we had anybody upset that they didn’t get funding — or at least nothing that we heard of.”
Satisfying the auditors
Early in the process, Booth and former county auditor Jonette Curry created a tracking sheet for each COVID-19 relief distribution. The tracking included the amount, the criteria the distribution fulfilled, and documentation.
Tracking also included verification that the federal government had not disbarred vendors from doing business with it.
“I signed off on them, Jonette signed off on them, and we were good to go. The state auditors liked that,” Booth said.
State auditors provided only one recommendation through the multiple quarterly reports.
The Treasury Department required local governments to allocate their ARPA money by Dec. 31, 2024. Governments have until Dec. 31, 2026, to spend it.
Knox County allocated and spent its $12.2 million by the fall of 2024. Booth closed the fund on Nov. 14, 2024.
“I had kind of told everybody earlier in the year, ‘Let’s do everything we can to close this out by Dec. 1,’” Booth said.
Going into December meant the fund would draw additional interest on the few dollars left. The county would receive that interest in January 2025. That meant the county would have to undergo another audit, a fairly intense process.
“It’s a testament to Jeff [Pickrell] and his team certainly, which is why we got out ahead of it really early, because he has all of his projects all of the time,” Booth said.
“So when I called and said, ‘I need projects,’ it wasn’t long before he was here to meet with us with a list, and we just stayed up on it.”
Lessons learned
When the U.S. Treasury Department released the criteria, it recommended “transformative” and “generational” projects. Treasury noted infrastructure was particularly well-suited because it is a strategic long-term asset that provides benefits over many years.
Pickrell had a list of needed projects, so the commissioners started there.
Seven months into allocating the money, the federal government loosened the criteria in the revenue loss category.
Early in 2022, Treasury said the county could take a $10 million standard allowance or calculate actual revenue loss. The commissioners chose the standard allowance.
That opened the door for them to distribute funds for basically any government services.
“I wish that the government would have told us that right out of the gate. When they started loosening the uses, it really got broad,” Booth said.
“We had already allocated certain things. It was early enough that we could pivot, but it wasn’t so early that maybe we wouldn’t have done a few things different.”
County administrator jason booth
Booth said if the commissioners could go back in time, they would have funded the county engineer’s office more than they did.
“His budget is tight, and we could have helped him with a lot more projects had we known in June of 2021 that it was allowable,” Booth said.
If the county ever receives another pot of money like ARPA, Booth said the county would guard against over-committing, recognizing that funding requirements change with government programs.
“It’s hard because you can only work on the information you have at the time. But I still feel proud that we spent it to the best of our ability and provided it to as many community members as we could. We got it out to many different venues without the county gobbling it all up, so to speak.”
Over the next few days, Knox Pages will examine how organizations receiving COVID-19 relief funds utilized them.
