This story is excerpted from Great Falls This Week, a weekly newsletter featuring expert reporting, analysis and insight from Montana Free Press. Want to see Great Falls This Week in your inbox every Monday? Sign up here.The Great Falls City Commission earmarked the remaining $198,000 from a massive federal COVID relief fund during a meeting earlier this month. It represented the city’s last 1% of spending under the program.Dec. 31 is the deadline for local governments to commit funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021, an infrastructure spending measure that injected more than $35 million in direct aid into Cascade County and Great Falls.Among the funded projects are water and sewer upgrades, Great Falls Fire Rescue building improvements and evidence facilities for both the Great Falls Police Department and Cascade County Sheriff’s Office. Officials also allocated millions of dollars to nonprofit community organizations, and the Civic Center received funding for major upgrades to its municipal court and outdated HVAC and boiler systems.The city of Great Falls and Cascade County each administered their own funds. Great Falls’ share was about $19.4 million — a major influx of federal dollars from the ARPA program known as State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. City Manager Greg Doyon said there were three times in recent history that local governments saw that level of federal aid. The first was after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The second was in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 following the Great Recession.The third time was the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to ARPA.“With my approach to the ARPA funding, it was such a significant amount of money that it really needed to be put to the highest and best use,” Doyon told Montana Free Press. “And there were conditions on it from the federal government that we needed to adhere to.”In general, spending conditions required that the recovery funds address the public health and economic impacts of COVID, replace lost government revenue, provide pay to essential workers and make investments in water, sewer, housing and broadband. Governments also had reporting requirements to account for how that money was spent.This chart shows where the city of Great Falls spent the majority of the $19.4 million in ARPA funds.The largest ARPA recipients and projects from the city’s fund included upgrades to the police department front entrance and evidence building ($4.1 million), equipment and building upgrades for Great Falls Fire Rescue ($4.9 million) and Civic Center upgrades ($7.1 million). Doyon said that much of the deferred maintenance might not have been addressed otherwise with limited capital improvement resources available in the regular budget.“Probably about 90% of them would not be done,” Doyon said, looking over the list of projects.The city commission’s final designations went toward contingency funds for two of the biggest city-level projects under ARPA. The police evidence building received an additional $75,000, and the municipal court relocation project received $123,040.91.In addition to prioritizing projects on city property, the city commission and a review committee held several meetings to narrow a list of community grant requests. Fourteen organizations received nearly $2.9 million of the ARPA funds.The biggest single community grant was $375,000 to Peace Place for its facility relocation and renovation. The organization provides free respite services to children with developmental, trauma-based or medical needs, and it outgrew its original location in First Presbyterian Church.“[ARPA] has made a huge impact,” said Peace Place Director Louisa Libertelli-Dunn. “We were able to double our capacity, service-wise, for our kids and create more unique and diversified programming that will adapt to their specific needs.”The funds paid for major renovations and accessibility upgrades at a new Fourth Avenue South location, which officially opened in February. For many of the kids the organization serves, the pandemic put some of their development on pause.“Two years after the fact, we’re still working on getting their social skills what they would have been before COVID,” Libertelli-Dunn said.Cascade County had its own pot of money to distribute — a total of $15.8 million, all of which has been earmarked. A large portion went toward major rural water and sewer projects, including more than $2.3 million for Black Eagle, $400,000 each for Sand Coulee and Sun Prairie and $500,000 for Belt, among others. Centerville School received $320,176 to drill a new well and upgrade equipment to deliver water to the school building. An unreliable well had caused school cancellations in recent years, affecting not only school days but one senior night basketball game.Cascade County had $15.4 million in ARPA funds to spend. This chart shows the largest recipients.“Previous to ARPA, three times within five years the school had the well go bad,” said Erik Ingman, Centerville school board chairperson. “It’s the only source of water out there, so if the well goes down, you have to cancel school.”Ingman said the school matched the ARPA grant with $30,000 of its own to get the project underway. The project is in the design and permitting phase, and Water and Environmental Technologies, where Ingman is an engineer, will perform the work.Other large recipients of county ARPA funds include the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office and detention center ($2.8 million) and Montana ExpoPark ($2.3 million). The county had its own list of community grant recipients, including the C.M. Russell Museum, Great Falls College MSU and a $1 million grant to the Great Falls Development Alliance to develop the AgriTech Park industrial area.Nationally, the American Rescue Plan Act was a $1.9 trillion aid package, of which local government aid was just a part. It had an array of programs, including stimulus checks and specific funding for health care and transportation. Other ARPA money came directly from agencies to fund projects across Montana.In addition, ARPA was not the only COVID-era infusion of federal aid. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, passed a year before ARPA, was a reimbursement program that was well-known for direct taxpayer payments and the Paycheck Protection Program. Great Falls received about $10.1 million for eligible reimbursements from that program, most of which went toward public safety personnel costs.CARES Act funds have been a stabilizing force to offset revenue losses in the years since COVID. Nearly $1 million from CARES balanced the general fund in the prior fiscal year, and that reserve is reaching its end.However, it’s ARPA that has a hard deadline of Dec. 31, 2024, to commit money to projects, and local governments across the country have made their final funding decisions under the program. Any unused money would have to be sent back to the federal government.Historically, these kinds of federal cash infusions came on the heels of devastating events. At the local level, City Manager Doyon said these upgrades will potentially avert a future infrastructure emergency.“The story is wait for something catastrophic to happen before you know, we end up getting funding to replace it,” he said. “In this case, we were able to get ahead.”In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who know your town. LATEST STORIES Jimmy Carter remembered in Montana “He was an outsider,” former Sen. Max Baucus said Monday following former president Jimmy Carter’s death at age 100. “People were tired of politicians in Washington, Watergate and so forth.” Baucus and Rep. Ryan Zinke recall their interactions with the former president. by Tom Lutey 12.30.202412.30.2024 A lasagna to launch the New Year This vegetarian lasagna has been a hit even with people who regularly eat meat. I’ve been tempted to serve it without telling them it’s vegetarian just to see if anyone even notices. 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