# 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 **Act 1006 of 2025**, formerly HB 1202. Section 35 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 section 35 pool totals $3 billion ($2 billion "directly awarded" plus $1 billion "awarded"). Section 40 supplies the transfer mechanism: the Chief Fiscal Officer reviews an agency request, must obtain prior approval from the Legislative Council or Joint Budget Committee, and reports transfers. (primary public record, [Arkansas Act 1006 of 2025, sections 35 and 40](../../web%20archive/2026-08-10/arkleg.state.ar.us/act-1006-of-2025-hb-1202-dfa-disbursing-officer-appropriation.md)) ## Structural significance - **It is a federally funded line that does not appear as an ASP surveillance-specific appropriation.** The General Assembly placed the ARPA pool in the DFA Disbursing Officer appropriation. An agency-specific transfer then requires Chief Fiscal Officer review and prior Legislative Council or Joint Budget Committee approval under section 40. The corpus still does not show a plenary appropriation naming ALPR or ELSAG, but it cannot characterize the transfer as wholly insulated from legislative review. - **It is comparable to, but legally distinct from, asset-forfeiture funding at the municipal level.** [[Conway Police Department]] used asset-forfeiture funds after the City Council declined to include Flock in the 2025 budget. ASP used a non-general-fund federal pool with the section 40 committee-approval mechanism. Neither record shows a surveillance-specific appropriation, but Conway's later ordinance and ASP's required committee review are different public-law acts. 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 transaction-specific section 40 record.** Act 1006 establishes the Chief Fiscal Officer request, committee-approval, and reporting path. The corpus does not yet contain ASP's request, the Legislative Council or Joint Budget Committee approval, or the transfer report for this ELSAG allocation. - **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. - **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.