ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis County Council said $74 million of the first installment of American Rescue Plan money is still unappropriated and the final installment is coming next month, for a total of $193.1 million that the county will need to allocate by 2024.
“We are very limited in what we can do even at this particular point. And considering the fact that we're even talking about plugging the holes for the deficit, that’s even a more dire situation,” Chair and District 1 Councilwoman Rita Heard Days said during a special meeting held Saturday to discuss how to spend the remaining funds.
To best figure out how to appropriate this money, the council decided to come up with a working group that will look at a variety of different factors that go into allocating the money.
“We’ve got requests for over $200 million worth of projects," District 7 Councilman Mark Harder said during the online meeting. "And we spent about a year ago a full Saturday going through what we thought were priorities before we even saw the money and what we thought, the areas. I think we need to revisit that.”
The working group, made up of council members and other staff, will also look at the data from a survey of thousands of St. Louis County residents and what they wanted to see done with the money. One recommendation from the survey shows $1.6 million going to regional arts programming.
“No sector was more impacted by Covid than our arts and culture here in town,” Sheldon Concert Hall Executive Director Peter Palermo said.
Programs like Opera Theatre Of St. Louis said they’re hurting right now because artists were the first ones to shut down during the pandemic and the last ones to be able to come back.
“Our ticket sales were down 17% compared to pre-pandemic levels. That’s a loss of more than $250,000 for our organization alone and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when we look at the arts community,” Nicole Freber with Opera Theatre of St. Louis said.
The council also decided Saturday they will set a funding application cut-off date but that date is still undecided.