In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which designated billions in federal funding to municipalities across the country to support the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Buffalo received $331 million in ARP funds – the biggest one-time handout from the federal government the city has ever seen.
The money had to be under contract by the end of 2024 to comply with federal rules, with any left on the table to be returned to sender.
Cue a December dash for the deadline from the City of Buffalo, revealing a list of ARP funded plans that would not be under contract in time.
In an effort to keep the unobligated cash in-house, the city rolled $17 million meant for community projects into its revenue replacement fund instead.
That means all in all Buffalo has used $177 million of its total ARP funds to plug budget gaps. That’s more than half.
And the dash for the deadline revealed another spending blunder. Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon alleged that a whopping $11 million designed to wipe debt for some Buffalo Water customers, was in fact spent on water infrastructure projects instead. Whilst that’s a permissible use of the money, it is not how it was meant to spent.
