St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said yesterday that all the federal money the city received in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic will have a home by a crucial deadline at year’s end.
“Every last cent of this federal funding will be spent on building a better St. Louis, as we promised,” Jones said.
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Jones made those comments at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a new 911 dispatch center in the JeffVanderLou neighborhood. She said that a bill that will be introduced next week at the Board of Aldermen will direct the final $10 million in ARPA money to help fund the dispatch center. And with that, the entirety of the $498 million St. Louis received as part of a federal stimulus program to help cities rebound post-COVID-19 pandemic will have been appropriated for a specific purpose.
The city is cutting it close with that last $10 million. St. Louis received the funds more than three years ago, in March 2021. Any money that isn’t obligated by December 31 could potentially have to be given back.
The city’s unobligated funds have become a source of controversy in recent weeks. As of yesterday, the city’s ARPA transparency portal indicated that $165 million remained unobligated. However, City Hall spokesman Rasmus Jorgensen says that for technical reasons there is a lag between funds getting obligated and that being reflected in the portal. “So the number 165 million, I think it is at the moment, that lags behind a month or two,” Jorgensen tells SLM. The allocations are currently waiting to be processed through the Comptroller’s Office, he says. “We all know where that [money is] going. There’s a plan for it all. It’ll be done by the end of the year, no problem meeting the deadline.”
“It better be lagging,” Ward 1 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer said of the portal. She added, “It takes awhile for contracts to get all of the necessary city approvals, and this is an incredible amount of contracting work to get done.”
Last week, Ward 8 Alderwoman Cara Spencer, who is challenging Jones in next spring’s mayoral election, called attention to the massive amount of money that appeared to be outstanding in a social media post.
“It’s like waiting until the week of finals to do all the homework for the year,” Spencer told SLM yesterday.
Told about the transparency portal’s lag, Spencer added, “If it’s a transparency portal that lags behind by a few months, that’s a massive problem.” She called it a failure of transparency. “They should have some way of communicating to the public what is remaining. That doesn’t sound like a transparency portal.”
Ward 4 Alderman Bret Narayan says that he’s confident all the money will be obligated on time, though he agreed things could have moved more quickly. “I wish that on the very front end of these funds, we had moved more diligently to allocate them,” he says, adding that the process was complicated by three aldermen getting federally indicted on charges related to bribery, including the two of the most senior on the board. Given the nature of those charges, he suggests there was a desire to slow down and make sure everything was “on the up and up.”
The new dispatch center, the recipient of the final $10 million, is expected to cost $45 million total. Jones called it “one of the biggest public safety investments in St. Louis in recent history.” When completed, the building will be a single location for all the city’s dispatchers for police, fire and EMS. The building will also house the City Emergency Management Agency.
Jones said that, among other benefits, the combined operation will bring down 911 response times, a major issue for the city dating back to her predecessor.
