‘Auditing’ ARPA

On Tuesday’s Finance Committee agenda, there is a motion to “conduct an internal audit of ARPA Funds received by Ottawa County. The audit should encompass: use and amount of those funds dispersed, who these funds were given to, and amount of dollars returned from each account.”

I am unsure what the third part of the motion, ‘amount of dollars returned from each account’ may mean, but the first two are already documented and easily researched. To find out more information on what the previous Board did as far as ARPA investments go, you could simply go through the packets of the relevant meeting. They are here, here, here, and here. As far as the third ask, ‘amount of dollars returned from each account’, if the question is accounting of the current status of ARPA funds, Fiscal Services prepared the below attached document for the December 5, 2022 Finance meeting. If the request is ‘how have those investments been playing out’, I think an easy solution is for the Board to simply ask the investees to stop by and report out how it’s going, the successes and what may need tweaking in order to optimize the investment.

The whole point of ARPA and the community investments it fostered was to create better outcomes, more opportunities and additional bonds within the community. Let’s continue to do that to really maximize our overall investments!