State recovery chief: Vermont has spent most ARPA money, redirected reversions to flood recovery and municipal aid

Doug Farnham, chief recovery officer in the Vermont Agency of Administration, told the Senate Government Operations Committee on Jan. 29 that state officials have obligated roughly $900 million of the state’s approximately $1 billion in American Rescue Plan Act state and local fiscal recovery (SLFRF) funds and have used targeted reversions and transfers to help pay municipal buyout matches and short-term town needs.

"We're we're up close to 900,000,000 out of that 1,000,000,000 formally expended with treasury," Farnham said, describing the state's work to obligate ARPA funds and to convert or revert program dollars as needed to meet deadlines and emergent flood recovery needs.

The detail matters because federal SLFRF rules gave Vermont broad discretion that required legislative appropriation. Farnham said the legislature appropriated roughly $500 million in 2021 and $500 million in 2022, with additional tweaks in 2023 and contingency language in 2024 to meet federal deadlines. He told senators the administration took steps in December 2024 to “spend down as much of that funding as possible” to reduce the amount the federal Treasury might revisit.

Farnham said the administration established a reversion process and set up an ARPA reversion “waterfall” that captured roughly $36,000,000 of funds from programs that had run their course or were not on track to spend by the federal deadline. "We ended up reverting 26,400,000 from ARPA funds," he said, adding that the largest single source of contested reversion money was weatherization programs.

On weatherization, Farnham told the committee that some weatherization efforts had low early spending…