New ARP Ruling To Help Counties With Reporting And Speed Of Projects

A new ruling on ARP funding has came down from the federal government allowing up to $10 million to be placed in a county’s general fund as a revenue loss.

Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter said he anticipates the county will take advantage.

“Once we take it as loss revenue, then we don’t have to do all the tedious reporting that has to be done to the federal government on each of those project, and so it will take a load off of my office and the folks working in it,” Porter said.

Porter said the money will still be used on water, broadband and the health department expansion. Porter said whenever the time comes to move forward on a project, the money will be moved to capital projects.

“We got the final rules from the feds finally,” Porter said. “They basically I think are loosening up the restrictions that they originally put on the money. We can take up to 10 million of the 15.5 that we’re getting as revenue loss during the pandemic as long as we spend it on government county services.”

Porter said the county did lose a lot of money during the pandemic but probably not $10 million. Porter said it was an arbitrary number provided by the federal government.

“It’s hard to figure,” Porter said. “We didn’t when it came to sales tax, but we lost a lot of money when it came to hotel/motel tax. There wasn’t a lot of people raveling and staying in hotels here, and then, we lost a lot when the State Supreme Court shut down all the court systems across Tennessee. So there was months and months and months that there wasn’t anything going on in the courts.”

Porter said the new rule will also help with the December 2026 deadline to spend the funding.