The second year of the pandemic was marked by dramatic highs and lows for Maine, from a successful public health campaign to get hundreds of thousands of Mainers vaccinated against COVID-19 to the omicron-fueled surge in cases that brought with it Maine’s single deadliest day of the pandemic.
And it was bookended by $1.5 billion in payments from a federal pandemic recovery program for local governments.
As part of the American Rescue Plan Act, the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program aimed to help communities mount a response to the pandemic’s devastating public health and economic fallouts.
Between May 2021 and May 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department sent $350 billion in direct payments to state, territorial, local and tribal governments nationwide, including to all 16 Maine counties.
But this huge influx of cash for Maine counties presented a bit of an “unusual situation,” said Maura Pillsbury, an analyst with the nonpartisan Maine Center for Economic Policy. As in most of New England, Maine counties perform relatively few functions compared to counties elsewhere.
While recovery funds barely made a dent in pandemic-incurred revenue losses for similarly sized counties in other states, the $261 million Maine counties received represented a windfall financial investment that in many cases equaled or exceeded annual budgets.
A large portion of that money, a Maine Monitor and Investigative Reporting Workshop analysis found, was budgeted for public safety projects.
While counties made deep investments in community projects and critical infrastructure, from a $15 million substance use recovery center in York County to more than $1.5 million to upgrade water and sewer systems across Aroostook County, they budgeted significantly more for emergency services, sheriffs’ offices and county jails.
Eligible uses
Treasury Department rules are purposefully broad to allow local governments to tailor their spending to their unique needs and “create programs and opportunities for their communities based on the assets that they had available,” said Glencora Haskins, a research associate at Brookings Metro, which is tracking state and local ARPA spending.
While Treasury rules laid out nearly 100 eligible use categories, local governments’ spending must generally fall into two primary areas. The first is to “address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, either acute or long-term,” Haskins said. But these connections can be fairly broad.
Haskins said that local governments could make the argument that public safety spending, for instance, “was in response to an increase in crime during the COVID-19 pandemic, or a perceived need to address evolving safety concerns during and after the pandemic by upgrading technology or infrastructure.”
The second large area is revenue replacement. Local governments could exempt up to $10 million, or use a Treasury formula to calculate actual revenue loss, under a provision that says recovery funds could be used to replace lost public sector revenue — virtually without explanation.
“They weren’t exempt from the obligation and expenditure deadlines, but they were not beholden to most of the other eligible uses,” Haskins said. “So up to $10 million could be used for virtually anything legal under state law, rather than just within the other eligible uses.”
Somerset County, for example, budgeted its entire $9.8 million in ARPA funds to offset county departments’ operating expenses under the revenue replacement provision. The money was spread across four budget cycles ending with the upcoming 2025-26 cycle, said county administrator Tim Curtis, with money allocated in proportion to departments’ annual budgets.
Because the sheriff’s office, emergency services and the county jail have the three largest budgets, they received the most money, Curtis said. Together, those three departments received 99 percent of Somerset County’s ARPA funds.
Curtis said the money made it possible to increase wages for county employees and improve recruitment and retention — which was encouraged by the Treasury department — without a huge impact on tax rates.
Haskins said the revenue replacement provision was meant to alleviate the reporting burden on small, local governments, and help them recover from the “very real economic damage” of the early pandemic years.
As the public health emergency began to wane, Haskins said some local governments nationwide began to use their funds in “more innovative, long-term, strategic ways.”
Her team at Brookings was most encouraged by “transformative or innovative” spending. These were projects that had “perhaps been on the shelf prior to COVID-19 due to a lack of funding or a lack of capacity, and ARPA really enabled them to move that forward,” she said.
Consider York County, which budgeted $15.5 million to build a 58-bed regional recovery center that includes the county’s first detoxification center, a residential and outpatient treatment program and eight observation beds — the single-largest investment in a project by any county.
Its second largest investment was $15.4 million to build a training facility for police, fire, EMS, corrections and other public safety officers from the region.
“While there were a lot of positive things that happened with the money, there was also spending that I think wasn’t as targeted toward things that would help people recover from the pandemic,” Pillsbury said.
Body scanners, tasers, ballistic vests
Infrastructure upgrades to public safety buildings and radio communication systems, along with equipment and software for sheriff’s offices and county jails, were among counties’ most common uses of the funds, The Monitor’s analysis found.
In six of the 16 counties, public safety expenses took up more than half of ARPA funds.
Androscoggin County budgeted nearly $3 million for equipment and software upgrades including $317,700 for body armor, night vision goggles, ballistic shields, pepper ball systems, Glock handguns, rifles with optics, data readers, tasers and body-worn cameras for the sheriff’s office; $366,600 for new patrol vehicles and related equipment for sheriff’s deputies; and $204,000 for a body scanner, tasers, stun belt, security cameras and various medical equipment, like an exam table and EKG machine, for the county jail.
The county also budgeted nearly $6.5 million for the purchase of two new buildings — the former Evergreen Subaru in Auburn and a floor of the former Peck Center in Lewiston — for the sheriff’s and district attorney offices, respectively, and related design and moving costs.
County administrator Jeff Chute said his recollection was that the sheriff proposed those projects to the county commissioners for approval. Chute, who was previously the jail administrator, was not county administrator at the time the bulk of those decisions were made, but said the equipment upgrades were “sorely needed.”
Aroostook County spent nearly $170,000 to purchase a body scanner for its jail. Before that, the county jail didn’t have one, so corrections officers would have to drive an inmate to Somerset County, the nearest county with a scanner, if they wanted to do a full-body scan, county administrator Ryan Pelletier said.
“So that was putting a lot of extra miles and overtime and things like that transporting prisoners a couple hundred miles south just to have a scan,” he said.
Aroostook and Androscoggin were among the six counties that spent between $138,000 and $200,000 to buy body scanners for their jails. Several wrote in public reports to the Treasury that the scanners reduce physical contact and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, only four counties budgeted funds to improve or expand medical services in county jails. Cumberland County made the largest investment — a $9.9 million project to build a new medical wing. The project broke ground last April and is expected to be completed this spring, compliance and audit manager Sandy Warren said.
Earlier in the pandemic, Cumberland County spent more than $550,000 on COVID-19 mitigation and prevention measures in the jail and to hire additional medical staff. Androscoggin, Kennebec and Franklin counties budgeted between $300,000 and $600,000 for medical staffing and equipment, or to expand their jails’ medical facilities.
Aroostook County commissioners decided to split their $13 million in ARPA funds, with half available to towns and nonprofits via a grant process and the other half for the county.
The decision to buy the body scanner, as well as the decision to spend $210,000 on body-worn cameras and tasers, came out of proposals made by the sheriff and jail administrator as part of an effort to “modernize” their equipment, said Pelletier, the county administrator.
“That was one where we would eventually have to buy those with county taxes and instead of using county tax dollars, we used the ARPA funds,” he said.
He pointed out that the largest public safety investment the county made was $3 million to build an upgraded radio communication system. The county currently has just three radio towers and has a lot of “dead zones” as a result, he said.
The regional communications center serves as the dispatch not just for the sheriff’s office, but for local police departments, emergency medical services and fire departments as well. The addition of 10 radio towers by this fall will “really enhance that capability,” he said.
Pillsbury, from the Maine Center for Economic Policy, chalked up some of these purchases to county governments’ role and function in Maine.
Some of the ARPA funds, she said, “ended up going to these places where they just met needs that maybe they already had, or that didn’t really address the challenges of the pandemic.”
