Source: United States Senator for Colorado Michael Bennet
Denver – Today, Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet welcomed over $71 million for 57 Colorado counties from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Local Assistance and Tribal Consistency Fund (LATCF). The ARP appropriated $2 billion to the U.S. Treasury across fiscal years 2022 and 2023 to provide payments to eligible revenue sharing counties and eligible Tribal governments. Colorado counties can now apply for their allocations through the LATCF portal.
“As local governments and, in particular, our rural communities recover from the pandemic, they need to be able to fund essential services such as law enforcement, education, search and rescue, road maintenance and public health for their residents and the millions of people who visit and recreate on our public lands each year. I pushed to ensure our public lands counties got their fair share of this funding and I look forward to seeing how communities put these funds to work,” said Bennet.
“This funding is critical for our rural counties across Colorado who lose funding due to public lands in their jurisdiction,” said John Swartout, Executive Director of Colorado Counties Inc. “Without Senator Bennet’s advocacy, Colorado counties were at risk of not receiving their fair share of funding from the American Rescue Plan. And thanks to his work our small, rural counties will have access to the funding they need to support their recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and maintain essential services.”
The ARP included $2 billion for a Local Assistance and Tribal Consistency Fund (“Section 605 funding”) to ensure that public lands counties could seek additional flexible funds to confront revenue shortfalls due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Following ARP being signed into law in March 2021, Bennet worked with the Colorado Counties, Inc. to ensure that the final interpretation of the language and the distribution formula would ensure Colorado’s counties with non-taxable federal land within their borders and Colorado’s Tribes would receive the funding they need to recover from the pandemic and support essential services.
Today’s announcement is for funds for both Fiscal Year 2022 and 2023. Funds will be made available to counties through the LATCF portal HERE. The funding will be made available to counties in two tranches.
More information about the Local Assistance and Tribal Consistency Fund is available HERE. A breakdown of the county allocations is available HERE.