At the February 28 Evanston City Council meeting, aldermen directed city staff to update the plan for the city’s $43 million American Rescue Plan Act allocation from the federal government.
The updated plan now includes eight categories for spending, reduced from the original 11 categories. Now the spending areas include public health, negative economic impacts, services to disproportionately impacted communities, premium pay, infrastructure, revenue replacement, administration and participatory budgeting
According to city documents, approximately $22 million of the funds, provided by the federal government as part of COVID-19 relief assistance, have been spent. This leaves $21 million available for future use.
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Along with the spending category changes came a recommendation to have committees responsible for each one of them, updated evaluation criteria and incorporating the city’s climate action plan.
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New evaluation criteria for projects seeking ARPA funding calls for an examination of project feasibility, budget, return on investment and community support.
Ald. Devon Reid, 8th Ward, suggested that a point system would be helpful in association with the evaluation criteria.
“If we created some kind of numerical criteria that we could judge [the proposals] by, it would give us better metrics on how folks are measuring up,” he said.
Updates to the city’s workforce development plan were also approved.
Previous work in that area includes creation in 2021 of a workforce development coordinator position to help devise a plan with local agencies for Evanston’s youth. Last month, the City Council approved $200,000 for the ASPIRE program to begin health care workforce development programming.
Ald Bobby Burns, 5th Ward, commended city staff for their work on the updates and for addressing the concerns of the council.
“I think this is now a document that … we can show the people that’s consistent and that will be consistently applied across all proposals,” Burns said. “I really want to give a shoutout to staff for putting this together.”
The City Council also discussed where residents and community members should go if they had an idea that would use ARPA funding. Interim City Manager Kelly Gandurski said that Sarah Flax, division manager for housing and grants, will be the contact person. She said that the city had hoped to hire an ARPA specialist but was unable to do so.
According to the city documents, the remaining half of the ARPA funds are set to be disbursed Evanston in May. The city expects to spend or allocate all of the money by the end of 2024.
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Emily Little is a freelancer.