Mayor's Corner: ARPA Dollars' Long-Term Impact For Lakewood

The City of Lakewood has a history of aggressively seeking and leveraging external dollars from federal, state, county, and other sources. As many of you will recall, perhaps our largest single success in this area was receiving over $47 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (“ARPA”) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reg- ulations for those dollars required that they be fully allocated by the end of 2024, and I am pleased to report that Lakewood met that deadline, using these funds to benefit Lakewood for decades to come.

The ARPA dollars came with strict guidelines and limited uses, but Lakewood was able to navigate those and leverage these funds for maximum effect. Early uses of ARPA focused on the immediate crisis needs of Lakewood residents, including $1.9 million dollars to help qualifying residents pay their rents, stay in their homes or apartments, and prevent eviction, foreclosure, and ultimately homelessness. Once crisis needs were addressed, the City of Lakewood focused on applying ARPA to address several other strategic needs.

The largest pool of dollars - over $31 million – went to reduce the burden of repairing our aged citywide sewer infrastructure. While this may not seem like an exciting use for these dollars, this was money that otherwise would have been assessed to our rate-payers in Lakewood – homeowners and businesses that use Lakewood water and sewer. By using ARPA dolars for sewer and watermain projects, we were able to keep down costs of utilities for Lakewood for decades on work that was an absolute must. We also were able to free up our bonding capacity, which would otherwise would have been largely eaten up with these very expensive projects, thus further saving interest payment expenses for the City. In many ways, these ARPA dollars were a lifeline and windfall to pay for water and sewer infrastructure costs that had been looming over Lakewood for many years.

Another key focus area for ARPA dollars was enhancing safety for Lakewood. Funds were allocated to pay for new state-of-the-art fire and police radios; the introduction of welcoming safety ambassadors in our parks; traffic calming interventions on Lakewood streets; and the initial funding for an increase in the maximum number of police officers as our department faced several retirements and a challenging hiring environment nationally in law enforcement. This approach was in line with our holistic approach to maintaining a safe and welcoming Lakewood.

While we heavily focused on infrastructure and safety, we were also opportunistic in using ARPA dollars to enhance Lakewood’s public amenities and key institutional partners. That includes dollars that went to upgrades at Foster Pool, Winterhurst, and Lakewood Park parking lot; the addition of Lakewood’s first pickleball courts; the construction of our new animal shelter; improving air quality at City Hall; and upgrades at Lakewood Library and the Beck Center.

Our overall goal at City Hall was to use our large allocation of ARPA dollars to have far-reaching benefits – projects and services for our residents and a reduction of burden to our taxpayers – while also ensuring full compliance with ARPA’s strict eligibility requirements. I believe we were able to do that – and unlike other com- munities in the US, we hit our deadline and left no money on the table.

My directors and I appreciated the partnership and dialogue with City Council during the process to apply the ARPA funds, especially the leadership provided by three different Council Presidents during that period – Dan O’Malley, John Litten, and our current Council President, Sarah Kepple.

The City of Lakewood will continue to aggressively seek and deploy outside resources to benefit the people of Lakewood.

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Volume 21, Issue 2, Posted 11:08 AM, 01.23.2025