Onondaga County’s $89.45M ARPA spend-down: $18.7M still on the clock as Dec. 2026 deadline approaches

By Charles Shack, Senior Reporter

The U.S. Treasury wired Onondaga County $89,452,165 in pandemic-era American Rescue Plan money. The county has roughly eight months left to spend what is left, or send it back.

That is the federal math, not a political talking point. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, signed by President Biden on March 11, 2021, created the $350 billion State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program, or SLFRF. Treasury issued the Final Rule on January 6, 2022, with an effective date of April 1, 2022. The rule sets two hard walls. Every dollar had to be obligated by December 31, 2024. Every dollar has to be expended by December 31, 2026. Anything not paid out by that date returns to the U.S. Treasury.

Onondaga County’s slice of New York’s $12.7 billion in SLFRF money was $89.45 million. That figure traces directly to the Treasury county allocation file released May 10, 2021. The basis for the allocation was the county’s population, the standard formula Treasury used for all 3,069 U.S. counties.

County Executive Ryan McMahon’s administration parked the entire pot in a single SLFRF expenditure category: revenue replacement. That is a deliberate choice. Revenue replacement gives recipients the broadest spending discretion under Treasury’s Final Rule. It lets a county route money into general government services rather than narrowly defined public health, water, sewer, or broadband line items. Many counties picked the same path.

The $18.7 million still on the clock

The latest project list posted to the county’s American Rescue Plan portal, dated July 31, 2025, accounts for the full $89,452,165 across 21 named projects. Eighteen are marked “Completed.” Three are marked “Greater than 50 percent complete.” Those three carry $18,726,082 in combined funding and are the items county taxpayers should watch as the December clock runs out.

The lagging trio:

• Lead Initiative: $3,726,082, marked greater than 50 percent complete. The lead-paint remediation effort came after a city-level lead poisoning crisis exposed in Syracuse pediatric blood-test data.
• Arts Film Incentives: $5,000,000, marked greater than 50 percent complete. A grant program intended to draw film and television production into Central New York.
• Semiconductor Manufacturing Center: $10,000,000, marked greater than 50 percent complete. Workforce and infrastructure money tied to the Micron build at White Pine Commerce Park in Clay.

The rest of the ledger is closed out. The biggest single line, $25,000,000 for White Pine Business Park site preparation, is marked complete. So is $19,729,709 for Site Development and Workforce Incentives, also tied to the Micron deal. So is $11,111,820 for the Broadband-Digital Divide build, the Verizon partnership that promised fiber to 1,500 rural households across 214 miles of new fiber optic line.

Other completed line items, by size: $6,616,643 for the Harborview Aquarium project on the Inner Harbor, $5,500,000 for Mental Health Clinics in Schools, $5,000,000 for Road and Bridge Work, $4,000,000 for Carnegie Building renovations, $2,094,734 for Industrial Wastewater, $2,000,000 for the Catholic Charities men’s homeless shelter, $1,997,008 for infrastructure maintenance equipment, $1,250,000 for the RESTORE harbor development grant, $1,000,000 for veterans housing, $615,488 in administrative costs, $229,075 for Public Health Fellows, $214,000 for emergency response, $209,412 for an AI technology project, $129,980 for a lakefront development study, and $105,757 for parks and facilities.

What the comptroller has said

Marty Masterpole, the Onondaga County Comptroller and an independently elected fiscal watchdog, told the local CNY Central I-Team in 2024 that COVID relief money was, at the time, being spent correctly. Masterpole’s office reviews every claim before payment to confirm it meets federal eligibility rules. As of the last quarterly report Masterpole shared publicly, covering Q4 2023, the county had spent roughly $49 million of the $89 million, with 14 projects either in progress or complete. The gap between that figure and the latest county portal data shows how much closeout work happened across 2024 and the first half of 2025.

The most current status as of the July 31, 2025 county filing is that all $89,452,165 is obligated and the bulk is expended. The Treasury obligation deadline of December 31, 2024 has already passed. Counties that missed that deadline had to return unobligated balances. Onondaga County’s portal shows zero unobligated dollars.

That puts the focus on the remaining $18.7 million across the three lagging projects. If any portion of those funds is still outstanding on January 1, 2027, it goes back to Washington. There is no waiver process for the expenditure deadline. Treasury’s Final Rule, codified at 31 CFR 35.10, is firm. The federal government’s Closeout Instructions for the SLFRF program, posted September 2025, lay out a step-by-step process for surrendering unspent balances.

How peer counties stack up

Erie County, New York reports $178.4 million in SLFRF money. As of December 31, 2024, the county confirms 100 percent obligation. Its July 31, 2025 Recovery Plan Performance Report shows over $56 million expended on the sewerage investment alone, putting the county at roughly 31 percent disbursed of the public-facing total. Onondaga’s portal-reported expenditure rate of $49 million plus subsequent 2024 to 2025 closeouts is materially ahead of that pace, though the comparison is complicated because Erie’s structure has more separately tracked categories.

Monroe County, New York received $144,080,127. The Bring Monroe Back program directed more than $98 million toward 40 named projects. Its expenditure pace is publicly reported through the county’s recovery dashboard and Treasury’s quarterly P&E filings.

Albany County, New York received $59.3 million in two equal tranches. The county confirmed all funds obligated and the application process closed.

The next federal deadline is the April 30, 2026 quarterly Project and Expenditure report to Treasury. Onondaga County, with population over 250,000 and an SLFRF award above $10 million, is required to file that report quarterly. The April 30 filing will be the cleanest public look at how much of the remaining $18.7 million has been moved.

Update, August 6, 2026: the same three projects, 147 days left

CNY Signal re-pulled the county’s American Rescue Plan project ledger on August 6, 2026, twelve months and six days after the July 31, 2025 filing this story was built on. Two things changed and one thing did not.

What changed is the shape of the ledger. It now itemizes 26 projects rather than the 21 the 2025 filing carried, and every line is categorized the same way, revenue replacement under Treasury expenditure category 6.1, Provision of Government Services. The total is unmoved at $89,452,165.

What did not change is the part that matters. The same three projects are still carrying a status of more than 50 percent complete, and they still total exactly $18,726,082. The Onondaga County Lead Initiative, project 700900004, at $3,726,082. CNY Arts Film Incentives, project 700900018, at $5,000,000. The Center for Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing, project 700900030, at $10,000,000. Twenty three lines are closed, worth $70,726,083 between them.

That is 79.07 percent of the award finished and 20.93 percent still exposed, with the calendar doing what calendars do.

The burn rate the county now has to hit

Here is the arithmetic nobody publishes. From August 6, 2026 to the December 31, 2026 expenditure wall is 147 calendar days. Spread $18,726,082 across them and the county has to move an average of $127,388 out the door every single day, including weekends and holidays, to avoid wiring money back to Washington. Per week that is $891,718.

Governments do not pay claims on Sundays. Count only weekdays and there are 105 business days left in the window, which raises the required pace to $178,344 per business day. For scale, that is roughly the cost of the county’s entire $129,980 lakefront development study, cleared every single working day between now and New Year’s Eve, with $48,000 left over.

Two of the three laggards are the kind of spending that can in fact move that fast. Film incentives and semiconductor workforce money are grant and contract disbursements, and a single executed contract can clear seven figures in one payment. Lead remediation is slower by nature, because it is paid against completed work on individual houses.

A second deadline that does not apply here, and why that matters

There is a second SLFRF wall that gets less attention. Funds obligated to surface transportation projects and to Community Development Block Grant projects have to be expended by September 30, 2026, three months before everyone else, per the National Association of Counties guidance on Treasury’s obligation rules. That date is 55 days from now.

It does not bind Onondaga County’s remaining money. Every line on the county’s ledger, including all three of the open projects, sits in revenue replacement under category 6.1. Revenue replacement is not surface transportation and it is not CDBG. So the operative date for the $18.7 million is December 31, 2026, not September 30. Counties that routed money through the transportation or CDBG categories are the ones with a September problem.

What Treasury’s formula actually bought per person

Treasury did not negotiate these awards. It divided the $350 billion by population, which means the interesting comparison is not the headline dollar figure, it is the per-resident figure, and no one had published it for these counties side by side.

Run the division. Onondaga County’s $89,452,165 against a 2020 Census population of 476,516 works out to $187.72 per resident. Monroe County’s $144,080,127 against 759,443 residents is $189.72. Erie County’s $178.4 million against 954,236 residents is $186.96. Three counties, three very different headline numbers, and a spread of $2.76 per person between the highest and the lowest. That is the formula doing exactly what it was written to do.

The same math turns the remaining exposure into something a taxpayer can hold. The $18,726,082 still unspent is $39.30 for every person in Onondaga County. A household of four is carrying $157.20 of federal money that either lands in a local project in the next 147 days or goes back to the Treasury General Fund.

What still has to happen

A few facts worth pinning down. Onondaga’s allocation is exactly $89,452,165 by the Treasury award letter. The county’s portal lists exactly that figure split across 21 line items. The American Rescue Plan Act was signed March 11, 2021. The Treasury Interim Final Rule took effect May 17, 2021. The Final Rule took effect April 1, 2022. The obligation wall fell December 31, 2024. The expenditure wall is December 31, 2026.

When the county ledger behind this story was pulled on May 8, 2026, there were 237 days left until that final deadline. About eight months. Just under 34 weeks. That clock has since run down, and the section below carries the current count.

The political context: McMahon, a Republican, won the SLFRF allocation fight at the legislature in 2021 with a near-unanimous vote that he later cited as the moment the spending plan locked in. His administration has used the funding to anchor several signature local priorities, the Harborview Aquarium and the White Pine Business Park among them. The aquarium absorbed $6.6 million in ARPA dollars. Total project cost is $103.8 million. The site is roughly 66 percent complete.

The remaining ARPA work that can still go sideways is concrete and named: a lead remediation push, a film incentive program, and the semiconductor workforce build. Each carries millions in federal money that has to leave the county checkbook by December 31. The county comptroller, the legislature, and the executive’s office all know the math. The April 30 report to Treasury will confirm whether the math is being met.

If any of those three projects falls short, the county sends money back to Washington. There is no eighth-inning waiver. There is no extension. There is, by federal rule, a wire transfer back to Treasury.

About 237 days remain.