TOM LISI | Staff Writer Lancaster County commissioners Wednesday approved more than $470,000 in grants to a Lancaster Farmland Trust farm preservation project and a Lancaster County Conservation District water quality initiative.
The grants are among the last allocations commissioners will award from the county’s $106 million pool of 2021 American Rescue Pan Act funds, which the federal government awarded to ease the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the approval of a $299,069 grant to the nonprofit farmland trust to preserve four farms in the county, and $172,131 to the conservation district to enhance water quality monitoring in the county, commissioners have appropriated about $99 million in ARPA dollars to date.
By the end of the year, commissioners must appropriate the several million dollars that remain, and those dollars must be spent or invested by the end of 2026.
Commissioners Josh Parsons and Ray D’Agostino have said they want to maintain a remaining $6 million unallocated balance for the time being, to address whatever needs might crop up between now and the end of the year.
That plan differs from Commissioner Alice Yoder’s stated desire to use some of that remaining money to fund additional community projects, particularly those related to affordable housing.
Last month, the commissioners approved three community projects: $230,000 to South Ann Street Concerned Neighbors to repurpose a southeast Lancaster townhome into affordable housing and a community center; $200,000 to Columbia Catholic Housing for the Elderly for a new heating and cooling system for a 123-unit affordable housing complex in Columbia; and $250,000 to Union Community Care for heating and cooling upgrades at its New Holland clinic.
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Where the money has gone
The commissioners office has kept a running tally of its ARPA actions since 2021, and LNP | LancasterOnline has updated those figures to reflect the board’s most recent approvals over the last month.
According to an LNP | LancasterOnline analysis, commissioners have so far awarded about $25.9 million to outside organizations and municipalities that went through a competitive county application process.
The largest chunk of ARPA dollars, about $32 million, according to the analysis, has gone to equipment and technology upgrades for county government: a $9.3 million replacement of outdated radio towers for the countywide 911 system, an $8 million overhaul of the county’s 20-year-old HR and accounting software and a $2.3 million countywide project to digitally scan paper documents.
Since 2021, when the ARPA law was enacted, commissioners also have directed about $7 million to county authorities for various purposes. Pandemic recovery money propped up the cash-strapped Lancaster County Convention Center Authority and the county tourism bureau, Discover Lancaster, and helped to fund special projects like a new homelessness services hub on South Prince Street in Lancaster. Some grants to county authorities, like $1 million for the homelessness hub, went through the county’s competitive application process for community-based projects. That project is slated to open later this year.
ARPA funds, roughly $2.7 million, also have gone to internal county operations, some of that money covering pandemic-related complications. Commissioners awarded about $1.1 million of that total to the sheriff’s department to help with staffing shortages, clear up a backlog of warrants and pay for extra costs in extraditing criminal defendants due to lingering pandemic restrictions.
Guidance on the ARPA funds from the U.S. Department of the Treasury allows counties to use the money to pay for some employee salaries and benefits incurred after March 2021. Counties in turn can spend general fund dollars on other things or increase their cash reserves.
The board of commissioners has so far directed about $31.4 million of county ARPA funds for that purpose. That helped the county government end last year with $61.8 million in general fund reserves, a move Parsons and D’Agostino have said has helped with the county’s bond ratings.
Budget Director Pat Mulligan said last month that the county may be eligible to send another $3.3 million in ARPA funds to the general fund later this year, based on federal guidelines.
With a massive new prison project on the horizon for the county, its bond rating will play a big role in how much it will cost the county to borrow potentially hundreds of millions of dollars for the effort.
