Good afternoon and welcome to today's Cobb County Board of Commissioners work session this Tuesday, July 28th of 2026.

Today we have three presentations before the Board of Commissioners.

The first is to provide an update on the American Rescue Plan Act.

The second is to have information and updates regarding housing in Cobb County.

And finally, to receive information regarding data centers.

For our first presentation, we have Bill Volkman, our deputy county manager, and I will turn things over to him for this presentation.

Thank you.

And good afternoon, Chairwoman, Commissioners, County Manager.

We are going to give you a ARPA update.

And I just want to share with you some of the progress that has been made through the ARPA program to date, as well as kind of what our next steps are as we move to the final close out.

So with that, we're going to touch on the ARPA award, the original award, but also the additional revenues that this generated and the total allocation that has been made to date.

And then finally, we're going to close out on the ARPA watch list.

Any projects that were kind of falling a little behind the spend program and kind of talk to you about what that may look like and then hit on the final summary and then open it up for any QA.

So with that, uh the county received 147 million dollars of ARPA direct award, and we went through an extensive community-involved process to determine how that would be allocated out.

But in addition to the original grant award, this program has earned $19.6 million of interest to date that has also been used to allocate out to programs for this ARPA project.

So to date, we've allocated out 167.3 million dollars.

And again, focusing on those key areas.

And if you remember when we did this back, I think the original allocation, you really had one specific agenda item came forward for those pillars, and we identified all the subrecipients within those pillars that we were serving.

Okay.

So food, housing, and shelter, we've touched over 800,000, 819,000 individuals through those programs, public health 224,000, education and careers, 34,000, safety and legal, 28,000, transportation and infrastructure, 9,000, and then other uh 840.

So overall, this program has touched over 1.1 million dollars of participants.

So that's pretty big impact over the last few years.

And we'll continue to update update these as we get through the final closeout.

We'll bring back the final list of the impacts that we received.

And yes, you're I think uh just to let you know, this is not individual.

So if an individual received you know food and housing, it didn't mean they couldn't be eligible for public health.

So this is individually how these programs have broken down over a million 1.1 million dollars of participants who have received some sort of funding or benefit.

So, for example, chairwoman, I see kind of how that's formulating.

So, for example, somebody could have seen received food assistance program, but then they could have also received a rental assistance program.

So they could have been in the pipeline for a variety of programs, but each program we wanted to count the participants that were served under those those various buckets.

Does that make sense?

Yes, so the number on the right indicates individuals that receive service under that category.

Okay.

And I do want to pause here because I think this is a very important stat of one over 1.1 individual people who have received some sort of assistance through these various programs, and just want to see if there's any questions from the board before I move off of this slide.

Yes, Commissioner.

But in there, even if they received food and then they received housing, they were still counted once for each.

Yes, that is correct.

Any other questions?

Okay, very good.

All right, so this is going to get into more of the spend.

So we just want to share with you of the 160 plus million dollars that we have allocated to date.

123 million has been spent to date.

47 programs have been 100% exhausted.

And that this is important as we're getting close to that September 30th dial that September 30th deadline.

We have 31 programs out there that are between 90 and 99 percent spent, and then as we move down 80 to 89 percent spent, we have 11 programs, and we have 10 programs that are below 80 percent spent.

And we're gonna show you the breakdown of those programs, and that is going to be really our area of focus over the next month or two to kind of walk through the plans and strategies to really talk about how we get to that full spend, and for any programs that we can't get to that full spend, we've been working with our partners in Deloitte as well as any program who has received 100% spend.

If there's any dollars that can be reallocated to them for a quick one-time purchase or to meet the original program criteria that they identified, we would go ahead and bring those forward as well.

And we have been doing that throughout the process, so this isn't a last-minute knee-jerk reaction to say, hey, this is kind of where we are, and Deloitte and through our partners uh through our partners in Deloitte, they've had monthly or if not weekly check-ins with some of the programs on this list just to make sure we can clearly identify how they're gonna meet that mark.

Any questions on the spend before we get into the 10 programs?

Very good.

Okay, so these are in spend percentage order, but just kind of want to walk through these and then we're gonna spend some time talking about some of the key themes here.

As you kind of walk down this list, you're gonna see Cobb Douglas Board of Health on here several times.

We now have a weekly or a bi-weekly meeting with them, and we are working through the final spend spend for each of these programs.

So we do anticipate they will hit their mark, and we are working through that strategy with our deployment partners at Deloitte.

But as we kind of walk down this list, we have some large capital purchases.

I'm gonna go to the Habitat for Humanity.

That is uh already approved project, and they are gonna go through the bill process, so they are looking some some large capital purchases for housing.

So that is in the works, and we feel confident that they're gonna move forward.

We had a little bit of delay with some zoning and questions as we move through that because it is a mixed development of habitat homes versus another developers building some of traditional homes in there as well.

So we're working through that process, but that project is moving full steam ahead.