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player ready...The Kane County Board is reallocating some more COVID-19 relief funds to things like HVAC improvement projects within the county, as the deadline to spend these funds nears.
On Tuesday, the county board approved several transfers intended to use up remaining funds the county has to spend by the end of the year.
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 about $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.
Reallocations of the remaining funds are essentially transfers from one county project to another. When funds are available because a different project came in under the amount it had been allotted, the county is able to move those funds to another project.
The county has previously made several other similar transfers.
“We want to utilize every dollar, and we want to dot the i’s and cross the t’s,” Kane County Board member and American Rescue Plan Committee Chair Verner Tepe said at a recent meeting of the board’s Executive Committee.
The measures approved Tuesday transfer a little over $400,000 in ARPA funds from one county project to another.
One of the transfers reallocates $342,506 from a judicial technology modernization project by the 16th Judicial Circuit Court to the Building Management Department’s jail tower HVAC system improvement project, per the measure. Another $65,497 was allocated away from the 16th Judicial Circuit Court’s technology modernization project toward a Sheriff’s Office HVAC system renovation project.
A third measure enables
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remaining ARPA funds up to $50 to be redirected from one ARPA project to another, with plans for a resolution outlining all such transfers to be brought to the Kane County Board at the end of the program for final approval.Also on Tuesday, the board approved amendments to agreements between the county and two outside organizations that received portions of the county’s pandemic relief funds — Plum Tree Child and Adolescent Psychology and Family Guidance Center.
These reallocations and amendments were approved on Tuesday by the full county board as part of its consent agenda.
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.