290 small and midsized Louisiana municipalities have been awarded over 315 million dollars in American Rescue Plan COVID economic relief funds. About half of the funds will be delivered this month and the other half will be delivered next June.
Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne said there are few strings attached to this historic allocation of federal dollars.
“There are not any guidelines that we have to impose on the cities and I believe that there is a broad discretion for these communities to use it for expenditures that they incurred responding to the pandemic or also for revenue loss,” said Dardenne.
Major cities and municipalities like New Orleans, Shreveport, St. Tammany Parish, and other larger communities are not included in this relief because they already received funds directly from the feds.
The funds are being allocated based on population. Dardenne says for example the city of Baker is receiving five million dollars while the Village of Noble will receive 1.6 million dollars.
“The state was essentially shut down so many of the small communities that often benefit from transportation and traffic passing through their communities with consumers spending money, well that just didn’t happen,” said Dardenne.
Dardenne said this is an unprecedented amount of money coming from the federal government to localities in response to the pandemic.
“We’ve never seen a distribution of trillions of dollars like this that have been sent to communities not just on a reimbursement basis but just, here’s the money, spend it wisely,” said Dardenne.
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