One Year Later, How Biden’s Rescue Plan Is Helping Northeast Iowa

Thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a nonprofit daycare center in Decorah is closer to its $7 million goal to build a new facility that will allow it to serve an additional 250 children.

The Sunflower Child Development and Discovery Center is able to leverage a $500,000 contribution from the Winneshiek County Board of Supervisors into additional grant opportunities to help with the surely needed daycare expansion project.

The county received $3.8 million in ARPA funds.

“Child care is one of our priorities along with affordable housing, and roads and bridges, of course, so that really is helping them get that project off the ground to have that matching funds,” said Winneshiek County Supervisor Shirley Vermace during a virtual ARPA forum sponsored by Progress Iowa.

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The American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 11, 2021. The $1.9 trillion legislation has poured millions into local government coffers across the country, including here in Iowa.

As a state, Iowa received $4.451 billion in ARPA funds. Iowa counties received $612 million, Iowa’s 12 metropolitan cities received $335 million, and cities under 50,000 in population received $216 million.

Vermace said the daycare wasn’t the only project that benefited from ARPA funds in Winneshiek County. The supervisors allocated $300,000 to the community of Festina for a sewer project. The unincorporated town is also home of the “World’s Smallest Church.”

“They need that badly and we didn’t want those few people who live in Festina to pay for that sewer project by themselves,” Vermace said. “It would be a huge amount of money for each of them.”

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Winneshiek County is also devoting funds to digitizing county records, flood management, expanding internet connectivity, and making improvements to the county fairgrounds and some county conservation areas.

Even with all of those projects, Vermace said they had about a million dollars left. The supervisors transferred it to the county’s farm-to-market roads account.

“It’s really hard sometimes to do all the roads and bridges we’d like to do—we have a very long list—so transferring a million of this over will help that as well,” Vermace said.

Vermace explained how she and her colleagues decided how to spend the ARPA funds.

“[We tried] to make these decisions to serve as many people as we could in our county with some of the projects we decided on this,” she said.

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The city of Independence, also the Buchanan County seat, lost its emergency medical service (EMS) provider in 2021, in the thick of the pandemic. City manager Albert Roder said of the $900,000 the city received in ARPA funds, it allocated $260,000 of it toward EMS.

“Bringing in a new ambulance service—not just for the city, but for our entire county—required a pretty healthy subsidy from three partners of which the city is one,” Roder. “And so we are using some of these funds to help offset the cost of that subsidies so that we’re not going back to the taxpayers and asking them to come up with a very large surprise tax.”

For the remaining funds, Roder said the city is working with residents to see how they want to use them.

“That’s a central theme of the whole American Rescue Plan foundation and we want to honor that and make sure our citizens feel heard and progress very deliberately,” he said.

The Rescue Plan was supported by Iowa’s Rep. Cindy Axne and opposed by all Republican federal lawmakers from the state, including Northeast Iowa’s Rep. Ashley Hinson.

by Ty Rushing
03/11/22

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