Overview
Digital Form and Process Help Deliver $58 Million Worth of Critical New Pandemic Recovery Programs
The 2021 American Rescue Plan Act armed Guilford County, NC, with $104 million to spend on healthcare, education, infrastructure, and small business programs to help the community recover from the pandemic. The comprehensive federal, state, and county guidelines attached to that funding made it impossible to manage on paper: each application required a 15-page form, and the county's review process involved eight steps and more than a dozen people across multiple departments.
“ARPA delivered the biggest infusion of government dollars we had ever seen at the local government level. It gave us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not just deliver more and better services, but also innovate on service delivery. We want to be sure that funded initiatives result in more equitable outcomes intended by the legislation, address our most acute problems, and can be sustained in both the short and long terms.”
Tiffany Oliva
Program and Fiscal Recovery Manager, Guilford County
Impact
- $58M allocated to recovery programs
- 250+ submissions evaluated
- Built in 1 week
Challenge
- ARPA's federal, state, and county guidelines made a paper process impossible to manage
- Each application required a 15-page form submission
- The review process involved eight steps and more than a dozen people across departments
- Extensive correspondence, internally and with applicants, was required for every submission
Solution
- A smart digital form organized ARPA's 30 spending categories, revealing only relevant fields based on prior answers
- Custom fields captured exactly what the county needed and what ARPA required
- Each application moved through eligibility verification, a preliminary risk assessment, legal compliance review, and a recommendation to the county's board of commissioners
- Once approved, the pandemic recovery team, finance, and legal prepared final agreements directly in the system
- All correspondence and supporting information stayed archived and accessible at any point
- Agenda and onsite assessment templates supported ongoing review meetings to fine-tune the programs after launch
Results
- Program, form, and workflow built in one week
- $58 million allocated across healthcare, education, utilities, small business, and workforce programs
- 250+ submissions evaluated within a one-month application window
- A full audit trail supports demonstrating compliance
- The workflow template can be reused for future programs, whether emergency response or standard operations
“With so many moving parts, it would have been challenging for our three-person department to keep track of every application in a manual, paper-based process of this magnitude. We were eager to deliver impactful services to our residents, but we needed the right tool to ensure we were doing it in an expedient, efficient, and more user-friendly way with minimal errors.”
Tiffany Oliva
Program and Fiscal Recovery Manager, Guilford County
County of Guilford
Population
546,101
Use Case
Grant Distribution, ARPA
Department
Finance, Legal
Municipality
County