In a bid to help make sure that New Haven doesn’t have to give back any of its $115 million in federal pandemic-relief aid, alders unanimously approved a set of interdepartmental agreements to ​“obligate” much of those funds before a Dec. 31, 2024 deadline.Local legislators took that vote Monday night during their latest full Board of Alders meeting, held in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.They voted to approve an order authorizing the use of roughly a dozen multi-year interdepartmental memorandums of understanding (MOU) to ​“formalize the obligation of American Rescue Plan funds to various city departments,” per the title of the proposal itself.As Westville Alder and Finance Committee Chair Adam Marchand said in support of the bill, these kinds of MOUs represent mechanisms ​“to allow the city to meet federal requirements to obligate these funds by the end of 2024.” In this context, an ​“obligation” of funds means a commitment in regards to how these funds will be spent. The city then has to finish spending all of its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) aid by the end of 2026.“This is very important because any failure to meet these deadlines results in the forfeiture of funds,” Marchand continued. And, as city budget staff presented to an aldermanic committee last month, a sizable amount of the city’s ARPA aid has yet to be spent.In mid-September, City Budget Director Shannon McCue told the Independent that, at that time, the city had spent $47.6 million in ARPA funds so far. It had contracted another $31 million out for various projects, and it had a remaining balance of around $36 million.Those dollars have been allocated to uses ranging from police surveillance cameras to vocational-technical education grants to youth summer jobs to police overtime, rental assistance, the Department of Community Resilience, and general fund budget-balancing. (Last week, Mayor Justin Elicker announced that he plans to propose that another $5.5 million in ARPA aid that wasn’t needed for budget-balancing be spent on public school building repairs instead.)All of this comes more than three years after President Joe Biden first signed the $1.9 trillion Covid economic stimulus bill into law in March 2021. The mayor proposed and alders signed off on the first tranche of local ARPA spending in the runup to the summer of 2021; alders’ most recent ARPA allocation approval came during this fiscal year’s budget vote in May.