# ARPA Pass-Through Funding (Arkansas) Federal **American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA)** funds allocated to the State of Arkansas and re-appropriated by the Arkansas General Assembly through the Department of Finance and Administration's Disbursing Officer to state agencies, departments, institutions, cities, and counties. The mechanism is the federal-pass-through analog of (but structurally distinct from) federal grants administered by the [[Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration — Office of Intergovernmental Services|DFA-IGS]] for programs like the Project Safe Neighborhoods grant that funded [[Pulaski County Sheriff's Office|PCSO]]'s pre-Flock Genetec system. ## How it appears in the corpus The first corpus instance of ARPA pass-through funding is the **2024-2025 [[Arkansas State Police]] ELSAG ALPR procurement**. The AASIS fund/WBS coding on every page of the procurement documents carries the identifier **`A.0960.ARPERR`** (sometimes OCR-rendered as `A.0960.APRPERR`; the contextually consistent rendering is `ARPERR`). Cost Center: 456949. GL: ASSET IN CONSTRUCTION. Asset#: 800004054. The statutory authority is [[HB 1202 Section 35 ARPA Appropriation Excerpt|Engrossed Arkansas House Bill 1202, Section 35]], which appropriates ARPA funds to the **Department of Finance and Administration – Disbursing Officer** *"for providing various state agencies, constitutional offices, and institutions with appropriation for any expenses associated with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026."* The HB 1202 §35 appropriation totals $3 billion ($2B "directly awarded" + $1B "awarded"). The DFA Disbursing Officer is the state-level intermediary that distributes the funds to specific agencies via internal allocation. ## Structural significance - **It is a federal-funded line that does not appear in ASP's own appropriation request.** The Arkansas legislative appropriation chain places the ARPA money inside the DFA Disbursing Officer line item, not inside ASP's annual operating-budget appropriation. The transfer to ASP — and ASP's expenditure of the money on the ELSAG procurement — therefore proceeds through state-administrative-allocation channels rather than through the Arkansas Legislature's ordinary appropriation process. ASP's ALPR procurement does not appear in any legislative appropriation specific to ALPR or surveillance. - **It is the structural analog of asset-forfeiture funding at the municipal level.** [[Conway Police Department]]'s 2024-12 Flock procurement (per [[Sole-Source Procurement Language Avoidance]] and [[Ordinance O-25-09 — LPR Bid Waiver and Asset Forfeiture Appropriation]]) used Conway's asset-forfeiture fund as the funding source, after the City Council declined to appropriate the cameras in the 2025 budget. The ARPA-pass-through funding at ASP serves a structurally similar role: a non-general-fund money source that allows the agency to acquire ALPR capability without specific legislative appropriation. *Observation:* Conway's pattern (asset-forfeiture around a declined budget) and ASP's pattern (federal-ARPA pass-through through the DFA Disbursing Officer) are different in detail but converge on a common outcome — the elected appropriating body is not the body deciding the surveillance acquisition. See [[ALPR Procurement Below the Appropriation Line]]. - **It links the ASP procurement to a broader federal-money inventory.** ARPA money is the largest single federal-pass-through line in the 2025-2026 Arkansas budget per HB 1202 §35; the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act appropriation in HB 1202 §36 is larger ($3.5B) but covers infrastructure rather than discretionary agency expenses. ASP's ELSAG procurement is a small-fraction draw on a very large pool of pass-through money administered by the DFA Disbursing Officer. ## Stakeholders - **US Treasury** — the federal source of ARPA money. - **Arkansas State Treasurer / Department of Finance and Administration – Disbursing Officer** — the state-level recipient and re-distributor. - **Arkansas General Assembly** — appropriated the ARPA money via HB 1202 §35 (2025 Regular Session, fiscal year ending June 30, 2026). - **State agencies receiving ARPA allocations** — including [[Arkansas Department of Public Safety]] / [[Arkansas State Police]] under fund code A.0960.ARPERR. - **The DPS / ASP Fiscal Section staff** who administer the agency-internal accounting — [[Wanda Worley]] and [[Anna Hawthorne-Pennington]] are named on the ASP-Leonardo procurement documents. ## Open questions - **The DFA-Disbursing-Officer-to-ASP allocation mechanism.** How does the DFA Disbursing Officer divide the $3B HB 1202 §35 pool among state agencies? Is there an agency-specific sub-allocation Act? A DFA administrative-allocation memo? A Legislative Council interim approval? The mechanism is not visible from this batch; Item 5 (grants) from the ASP Grants Division when it arrives may include the answer. - **Whether the ELSAG procurement is one of multiple ARPA-funded ASP expenditures.** The A.0960.ARPERR fund code may cover other ARPA-funded ASP capital purchases beyond the ELSAG system. The corpus does not document the full A.0960.ARPERR spend inventory. - **HB 1202's enactment status and Act number.** The corpus has the engrossed bill text (3/12/25, 4/1/25, 4/10/25 engrossment dates). Whether the bill was enrolled as an Act and the Act number are Tier-2 research-backlog items. - **The "ARPERR" sub-code expansion.** The fund code `A.0960.ARPERR` has the structure A.<agency>.<fund-name>. "A.0960" is the ASP/DPS internal code; "ARPERR" is the fund-name. Its full expansion ("ARP-ERR" most-likely shorthand for "American Rescue Plan – Eligible Reimbursable Recovery" or similar; or "ARPER R" with R as a budget-cycle letter) is not documented in this batch. - **The "Annual budget exceeded by 11,486.65 USD" warning** on the 2025-02-24 smaller PO documents that ASP's FY2025 A.0960.ARPERR allocation was overdrawn by ~$11K at the moment the smaller PO was processed. Whether the override was a DFA Disbursing-Officer reallocation, a cross-fiscal-year carry-forward, or an internal DPS Fiscal Section override is not visible in this batch. ## Notes - The ARPA-funding pattern at ASP is the corpus's first documented federal-money flow into an Arkansas LE ALPR procurement at the state-LE level. PCSO's pre-Flock system used a federal DOJ-BJA Project Safe Neighborhoods grant (different funding mechanism — administered through DFA-IGS as a competitive sub-grant, not as ARPA pass-through through the DFA Disbursing Officer). - Tier-2 web research on Arkansas's overall ARPA receipt and allocation history (state-by-state federal disbursements, US Treasury ARPA reporting requirements, ARPA-specific Arkansas public-records compliance) is a research-backlog item that would anchor this page further. - See [[Federal Law Enforcement Grants for Surveillance Procurement]] for the comparable concept of competitive-grant funding (PSN, COPS, JAG, etc.) — distinct in mechanism but related in outcome.