WARREN, Ohio - It's time to "use it or lose it" for ARP funding, set to expire at the end of 2024.

Back in 2021, Trumbull county received about $38 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, which they've since spent on a number of projects, county hires, ambulances, and resources.

"We invested in our townships and cities, so we spread the money all over the county so that they could do things they may not have had the money to do," Commissioner Dennis Malloy said. "So we consider this more of an injection into the economy, rather than just sustaining as usual."

A significant amount of Trumbull County's ARP funds were invested in improvements to the county's water and sanitation systems. Malloy detailed that some of those projects covered problems that had gone ignored.

" The infrastructure projects seem to be predominantly what we did so we were able to clean up some messes that we had that the EPA was mandating that we do -- some of them that went back as far as thirty years ago," he said.

Now with one month left to go, the county has $178 thousand in untouched funds to earmark, with an additional $1 million coming back to the county to re-allocate.

But after that, Commissioner Malloy said, the county is done. Any responsibilities to sustain long term maintenance on those projects will be passed to the cities and townships, financed through their regular budgets.

"ARPA was able to bring us to kind of a baseline, and now we just need to do business as it should be done. We just have to live within our means as far as the tax money we have coming in," he noted.

But he's optimistic about the financial outlook for Trumbull County.

"Counties operate predominantly on sales tax, and we know sales tax numbers are going up," Malloy goes on to explain. "Our economy is thriving, and we predict it's gonna thrive even better over the next four years."