Jeny Quintanilla sat on the floor of her living room and turned the pages of a picture book while a bib-clad toddler pawed at it. Christmas music played softly from a speaker. Colorful posters dotted the walls, and paper clouds hung from the ceiling. A second toddler picked up a toy dinosaur, put it in his mouth and blew into it like a trumpet.
Quintanilla watches as many as eight children some days at the child care center she opened out of her SeaTac home in June. She is one of 12 graduates of a startup accelerator program meant to address the shortage of child care providers. SeaTac city officials funded the program with $1.8 million in federal COVID-19 aid from the American Rescue Plan.
“It’s not like a job where you just go in and do your job,” Quintanilla told Cascade PBS through an interpreter as her assistant minded the toddlers. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but it is nice to make your own decisions and organize so the kids feel comfortable.”Quintanilla said she moved to Washington with her two children in 2021, leaving a career as an attorney in El Salvador to work as a cleaner and then at a home-based child care center in Kent. Her boss there encouraged her to start her own business, lent her money and served as her mentor during the 10-month-long training program.“It was a very hard first year for me here doing manual labor and cleaning,” Quintanilla said. “I didn’t imagine I could do something like this.”SeaTac’s training program has a second cohort of trainees graduating this month with another set to begin in February. It is run in collaboration with The Imagine Institute, a nonprofit that offers similar mentorship programs across the state. The program is one example of how some local governments, awarded a one-time federal windfall that they must decide how to spend by Dec. 31, devised creative ways to address long-term issues intensified by the pandemic.This story is a part of Cascade PBS’s WA Recovery Watch, an investigative project tracking federal dollars in Washington state.City, county, tribal and state governments across the country received $350 billion in direct aid as part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus package passed by Congress in the first months of the Biden administration. Federal data shows Washington governments collectively received more than $6.5 billion. The money came with few strings attached, but it must be obligated to a specific use by today and spent down by the end of 2026.The list of expenditures is long, but commonalities have emerged. Local governments put ARPA dollars into long-delayed repairs to aging water and sewer systems and to supporting businesses and nonprofits still reeling from the pandemic. They plugged holes in the social safety net, stepping up investments in low-income housing, homeless services and food banks, with some even handing out cash relief to low-income families and artists.Some purchases were more contentious. Local governments bought police department wish-list items like new cars, tasers and drones, and acquired new high-tech tools that expanded police surveillance capabilities.The money enabled governments to experiment with or support out-of-the-box ideas. One such proposal came from Habitat for Humanity of Clallam County, which used a $100,000 ARPA grant to help older homeowners age in place by installing grab bars, slip-free flooring, railings in hallways, ramps and other ADA improvements. Port Angeles City Manager Nathan West said the city also used ARPA funds to hire a full-time housing administrator, which has helped accelerate city initiatives around zoning reform, fee waivers for certain building permits, and pre-approved designs for duplexes and backyard cottages.“I think the creative thinking was already there,” West said. “What ARPA really did was open the door for us to get that position, which overall built some capacity.”Once-in-a-generation opportunityEven now as the deadline for budgeting arrives, it remains difficult to tell a single story about the unprecedented federal handout. Not only because of the myriad ways local governments used the funds, but because federal reporting rules do not require jurisdictions to explain how they spent the money if they categorize it as “revenue replacement,” a catch-all designation that simplifies reporting requirements by allowing them to designate the money as spent without directing it to a specific purpose. Washington jurisdictions reported claiming more than $1.5 billion of relief funds under this category.“The ability for governments to use [ARPA] for revenue replacement … is the best – or worst – way to diffuse those resources so that you never even see the impact,” Zeke Smith, president of Empire Health Foundation, told Cascade PBS in 2022.In some cities, community groups say the debate around how to invest the money pushed local governments to be more responsive and collaborative. Officials in other jurisdictions passed funding along the usual channels, plugging budget holes or awarding projects with minimal public input. Six Washington cities turned down or otherwise failed to claim the direct ARPA funds, Cascade PBS reported in 2022.Elsewhere, some of Washington’s tiniest cities received federal funding for the first time officials could remember.The Grant County farming town of Hartline spent their $43,000 allocation on a small but practical purchase: upgrading the town’s 103 water meters so they could be read remotely. Drew Allsbrook, Hartline’s part-time mayor, said he used to go door-to-door brushing dirt off the individual meters and writing down each household’s water usage so the city could bill them. The new technology saves him four hours of house visits per month – time he can redirect to his other duties, like spraying weed killer in sidewalk cracks and plowing the streets when it snows.At the other end of the spectrum, larger cities spent millions to realize long-held infrastructure goals like revitalizing downtown public spaces. Pullman in Whitman County used its entire $9.6 million to overhaul the city’s Main Street, adding bike lanes and crosswalks, widening sidewalks, and reducing and narrowing car lanes.Walla Walla permanently closed to cars a downtown block that had hosted a temporary pedestrian plaza in 2020, adding colorful tables and chairs, trees and planters, and café-style lighting. The square now hosts a Christmas tree and has become a popular spot for coffee meetings and college study sessions, according to City Manager Elizabeth Chamberlain. The city also renovated a nearby public square that’s now used for events. The two projects combined cost about $4.3 million.“I don’t think you can walk through WalaWala plaza and not see someone you know,” Chamberlain said.Many cities and counties passed relief funds along to hard-hit businesses and nonprofits, which also benefited from a half-billion state grant program funded with federal pandemic cash. A few went further, cutting checks to individual households. Kenmore’s $1 million direct cash assistance program focused on families making less than half the area median income, while Spokane designated $1 million to subsidize living costs for artists. Neither program put specific limitations on what recipients could do with the funds.“We said, ‘We know you’re struggling and you know best what your household needs,’” Kenmore Deputy City Manager Stephanie Lucash said.Re-funding the policeGenerous federal aid coincided with an increase in crime that put pressure on city councils to respond. With the encouragement of President Biden, some local governments invested ARPA funds in hiring new officers and upgrading police technology.The city of Yakima spent $4.6 million to replace nearly its entire fleet of squad cars. Pierce County tapped $4 million to give each sheriff’s deputy a $10,000 bonus. And Yakima County spent $350,000 on an armored “Bearcat” vehicle.Some local governments made these decisions with little public input. The city of Auburn approved a $1.7 million gear buy that included 123 tasers during a short meeting in which the purchase was never mentioned. (Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus told Cascade PBS in 2022 that it was discussed in a previous work session.)Across the state, police departments have also tapped federal funds to acquire powerful new surveillance tools with few legal safeguards to restrict their use.Spokane’s Real Time Crime Center, which got fully up and running this month, was funded with nearly $5 million in ARPA funds. The crime center provides a central hub where officers can access dozens of live security camera feeds and track the movements of vehicles captured by a network of over 40 automated license plate readers, Cascade PBS reported in 2023. License plate readers collect mass data on drivers which is often shared into a database accessible to many police departments across the country. Without state regulations, individual departments are free to choose whether to track and share the plates of shoplifting suspects or immigrants with deportation orders. A 2022 report from the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights found sheriff’s departments in Yakima and Okanogan counties shared data with police agencies in states where abortion is a crime.Other states have used the funds in even more controversial ways. Alabama spent $400 million of COVID aid constructing a 53-building prison. Although the U.S. Treasury said prisons were not an allowable use, construction is nearly halfway done, according to the state’s department of corrections.ARPA’s legacyThe U.S. Treasury requires all recipients to submit reports cataloging their spending into one of four broad categories and describing funded projects, but those reports vary greatly in detail. Some reported projects contain only vague language describing typical city functions without specifying dollar amounts.While some jurisdictions have made those details public voluntarily, others have remained vague about allocations. Benton County’s unwillingness to reveal how it spent its “revenue replacement” funds, which Cascade PBS first reported, prompted outcry from the Tri-City Herald editorial board in 2022. The county later released more information to the Herald but did not appear to clarify what the $10 million marked as “revenue replacement” was spent on.Find tools and resources in Cascade PBS’s Follow the Funds guide to track down federal recovery spending in your community.Elsewhere community groups have praised government officials for engaging the public in making decisions about how to use the funds. Kenmore launched an online tool that allowed residents to vote on which projects they wanted to see funded and how much money they would like to see allotted to each one. In Spokane, the city council held public engagement hearings throughout the city and created a dot matrix for council members to rank projects.“The city prioritized getting the money on the ground into community groups,” said Leroy Eadie, vice president of programs at the Spokane-based Empire Health Foundation. “They really stepped up in a way other jurisdictions did not to create consensus.”Spokane gave nearly $10 million directly to businesses and nonprofits. Caleb Stanton, the city’s ARPA facilitator, said the experience of working with business owners who didn’t speak English revealed how many city resources are unavailable to non-native English speakers and inspired changes to make city government more accessible. One example: The city recently unveiled a tool that uses AI to translate city council agendas into different languages.“We have 80 different languages spoken in Spokane public schools,” City Council President Betsy Wilkerson said. “I don’t even know 80 languages … that made us start thinking.”There were also missed opportunities. One of Wilkerson’s passion projects was a $1 million pilot to build public bathrooms, which she hoped would address complaints about homeless people defecating on lawns of downtown condominium owners, a problem made worse by pandemic closures. But business owners pushed back and turned public sentiment against the project.“The narrative had taken hold that only drug dealers would use the bathrooms,” Wilkerson said. “The money was there but I couldn’t get anyone to bite.”Similar conflicts over addiction treatment centers and homeless shelters have complicated Spokane’s ARPA efforts. And the council has more than once clawed back funds from projects and reallocated them elsewhere. Even with unprecedented levels of federal support, many ideas and proposals got left on the table. “You get $81 million and you think you can spend it on everything,” Wilkerson said. “But actually it goes pretty quickly.”
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