As the deadline to spend them approaches, the Kane County Board is reallocating some COVID-19 relief funds to things like HVAC improvements at the Kane County Justice Center and ongoing projects at the county’s Environmental and Water Resources Department.
On Tuesday, the county board approved several transfers meant to use up remaining funds the county must spend by the end of the year.
At an Executive Committee meeting the week prior, board member and chair of the county’s American Rescue Plan Committee Vern Tepe explained that the recent reallocations are essentially transfers of available funds to other projects. When the county has funds available because a different project came in under the amount of funding it had been allotted, the county is able to move those funds to another project.
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The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, commonly called ARPA, was signed into law by former President Joe Biden in 2021, with the goal of helping the United States deal with COVID-19 and help out the economy.
Part of that relief package was a $350 billion program to distribute aid to state and local governments, meant to support their response to and recovery from the pandemic.
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.
Kane County received around $103 million in total, per the county, and in the years since 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, for example, and funded HVAC replacements in the county’s jail and Sheriff’s Office.
Last year, the county board approved reallocations of ARPA funds similar to those passed Tuesday, amounting to almost $500,000.
Included in the transfers last year were reallocations of funds from the Kane County Circuit Clerk’s microfilm archiving project, which set out to digitize court records to improve remote access; 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 board at the time also reprogrammed funds between several ARPA projects in the Environmental and Water Resources Department.
The reallocations approved Tuesday amounted to a little over $100,000, according to figures from the meeting agenda.
“This seems like nickels and dimes,” board member Mavis Bates said at the county board’s Executive Committee meeting last week, “but what it has done is made sure that we left no money on the table of that $103 million.”
Recipients of the fund transfers include a kitchen and laundry area HVAC improvement project at the Kane County Justice Center and two Environmental and Water Resources Department projects — a drainage cost share consultant and capital project and a stream gauging network project.
All of the reallocations ultimately received final approval from the county board on Tuesday.
The board on Tuesday also approved some amendments to agreements between the county and several outside organizations that received portions of the county’s federal pandemic relief funds — organizations like PADS of Elgin and Suicide Prevention Services of America.
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At Tuesday’s meeting, Tepe noted that these are not new agreements, and that the county already had agreements with these organizations under ARPA.
Around $22 million of the county’s federal pandemic funds remained to be spent as of early 2026, per the county. That money includes project savings or unspent awards and will be reallocated within existing agreements.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.