Following the release last week of their final rule for use of ARPA’s local recovery funds, the U.S. Department of the Treasury held a webinar on multiple dates to provide an overview of the rule’s provisions. The hour-long webinar recording is now available online  on YouTube, along with the PDF of the slide presentation.

A number of useful materials to help counties ensure they follow federal guidelines are available on Treasury’s SLFRP website. These include the text of the final rule, an overview of the major provisions of the rule, and a spreadsheet for determining low and moderate income households.

Counties will note that the document containing the final rule is 437 pages, but the actual text of the final rule begins on page 404, with the earlier pages dedicated to an explanation of the rule, summaries of the comments received, and explanations of how the final rule responds to those comments, as well as a number of examples of projects that comply with the rule.

The final rule goes into effect on April 1, 2022, and counties must comply with it as of that date. Counties may take advantage of the final rule’s flexibility beginning immediately if they wish. They may also continue operating under the interim rule until April.

Counties must also follow the Treasury’s compliance and reporting guidance for the fiscal recovery funds. Counties with at least 250,000 residents and those who are receiving at least $10 million of fiscal recovery funds are required to submit a report by the end of January 2022. Other counties reports will be due by April 30, 2022. Treasury has provided an excel spreadsheet tool for counties to determine which reporting tier they are in.

Finally, counties can also access a wealth of useful information available from NACo on their ARPA resource hub.