Kane County Board approves reallocation of federal pandemic relief funding, as deadline to spend it nears

Chicago Tribune

12-03-2025

The Kane County Board on Tuesday voted to approve just under $500,000 in 'reprogramming' federal pandemic relief funding to various county projects in advance of a spending deadline in 2026.
In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act, commonly called ARPA, authorized the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, which delivered $350 billion to state, territorial, local and Tribal governments, according to the United States Treasury Department. The funds were intended to help these government entities and their residents recover from the effects of the pandemic, and could be used to respond to public health and economic impacts of the pandemic, invest in water and broadband internet infrastructure, provide 'premium pay' for essential workers and more.
Kane County received just over $100 million in total, and used the money over the past few years on COVID-19 contact tracing, grants for area nonprofit organizations, public safety projects, payroll reimbursements and infrastructure projects and expenses. In July, the county issued its 2024 report with updates on the county's use of these funds.
Local entities nationwide had until the end of 2024 to allocate the ARPA funds they received, according to the Treasury Department. The funds can be spent through the end of 2026, but can only go toward projects or services authorized before Dec. 31, 2024.
Tuesday's board approval means some of the funds set to expire next year in Kane County will be transferred from one ARPA-funded project to another. Several of the reallocations were voted on at the county's Executive Committee meeting last week and were then passed unanimously during Tuesday's County Board meeting, but three of the larger sums of money were passed Tuesday in split votes.
The resolutions which passed with split votes include three separate reallocations from the Kane County Circuit Clerk's microfilm archiving project, which set out to digitize court records to improve remote access, with the money going to a kitchen and laundry area improvement project at the Kane County Justice Center for just over $300,000, the county's administrative cost projection project in the amount of $120,000 and a technology improvement project at the 16th Judicial Circuit Court for roughly $17,500.
The reallocations passed unanimously as part of Tuesday's consent agenda at the meeting included, for example, reprogramming funds between several ARPA projects in the Kane County Environmental and Water Resources department, and a transfer of just under $10,000 to a pipe improvement project at the Kane County jail from the Kane County 16th Judicial Circuit Court Services' Probation Victim Services and Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists projects.
In all, just under $500,000 in ARPA funding was reprogrammed to various projects on Tuesday, according to figures from the meeting agenda.
At Tuesday's board meeting, District 14 County Board member Jon Gripe said he was voting against the reallocations of funding because he thought that other board members and county entities outside the county's ARPA Committee – such as the Circuit Clerk's Office – were not sufficiently involved in the discussion of these measures.
'The people that the money is being removed from, if that's the case, need to be involved before the day of the meeting where we vote on this,' Gripe said on Tuesday.
Going forward, the County Board could authorize similar reprogramming of ARPA funding before the 2026 deadline to spend the money, a county spokesperson said. But these reallocations of ARPA funding and future ones cannot go toward new projects, only those authorized before Dec. 31, 2024.
In the years since the county began receiving the federal pandemic funding, it has pursued a variety of programs and capital projects. It gave out $755,000 in grants to food-growing businesses and organizations, with a focus on small farms and those addressing food insecurity, funded HVAC replacements in the county's jail and sheriff's office and proposed the construction of a new public health building, although the latter plan ultimately was shot down by the board.
But, with no more funds to allocate and a limited amount of time to spend what's left, the county continues to face financial challenges as it anticipates using up its reserve funds by 2027 or 2028 if revenue or expenses don't change before then. The board has previously said that pandemic-era funds were used to pay for some salaries in the county, as well as other programs and projects.
The board has been holding town halls about its sales tax referendum on the April 1 ballot, which has been touted as a possible solution to the county's future budget woes.