Use of $3B+ in Oregon State and Local Government Federal ARPA Allocations, My Projection is that 77% Was Unobligated As of March 31.

ARPA's State and Local Federal Relief Fund (SLFRF) program provided $4.1 Billion to Oregon state and local governments. 

Oregon reporting on the spending of the money hasn't been transparent or centralized and Treasury reporting requirements vary by the type of grantee and the funding level received. 

July 31st is the deadline for "Tier 1" grantees to file their annual performance report with the Treasury covering the period through March 31, 2022. (My post on December 31st, 2021 Oregon spending is HERE).

There are 7 "Tier 1" grantees in Oregon. (State of Oregon, City of Portland and these counties: Clackamas, Lane, Marion, Multnomah, Washington). These Tier 1 grantees received SLFRF allocations that totaled $3.3 billion.  

The limited  Treasury reporting mandates will make it difficult to extract and compare the level of fund obligations and spending for each of the grantees.  (A City of Portland website HERE is one of the better Oregon efforts to post information , but cross comparisons with other Oregon grantees is not possible). 

Housing related expenditures are also not simple to extract as they can cover multiple categories and require a name search using keywords to identify.

I extracted the latest March 31st Oregon data available from Treasury and created the 2 page PDF file with a graph and table HERE ,and embedded below, which shows MY calculations of the allocations, obligations, spending and project counts for each of these 7 Tier 1 grantees. 

Tier 1 Grantee Observations:

• 23% of the allocated funds have been obligated and 9% have been spent. Clackamas county had obligated only 8% and spent 7% and Marion county had obligated 6% and spent 1% , while the State of Orgon had obligated 25% and spent 9%.
• There was a total of $2.5 billion unobligated and $3.1 billion unspent as of March 31st. The State of Oregon shares of unobligated (79%) and unspent (77%) were nearly identical to their 79% share of the total SFLRF allocations to these 7 grantees. 
• These grantees had a total of 302 projects funded by SFLRF.
• It's VERY difficult to filter out housing related projects as a the "project" description may include several activities. My manual count is 47 housing related projects from these Tier 1 grantees. They represent 16% of all projects, 6% of all obligations and 7% of all expenditures.  I will publish a list of those projects after seeing the grantee annual performance reports in early August. 
• Marion county is the only county with NO housing related obligations They also only had two projects obligated and one of those was $3.6M for county wide MS Office 365 licensing. Marion county had $63M unobligated so the opportunity to fund housing activities was still available as of end of March. 

I will be looking forward to the published annual performance reports from these grantees so that I can compare my observations with those in the reports. 

I'm especially interested in housing activities but also want to see how clear grantees are about their levels of obligations and expenditures. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog. 

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