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Former Secretary-Treasurer Gives Report on ARPA Funds

By Michelle Beaudin

LCO Tribal Governing Board Member


I am proud to announce that, as one of my last acts as Secretary/Treasurer of Lac Courte Oreilles Tribal Governing Board, that I applied for and received 2 payments from the American Rescue Plan Act for LCO. The first payment was in June, and the second request that became available during our transition period of Board Officers, I still applied for the second portion of the funding on behalf of the Tribe and we just received the second payment from ARPA.

So far with this funding we have paid out stimulus payments to our Tribal Members, we are also looking at continuing to support the efforts to protect our Communities against COVID-19 and the Delta Variant. We have put invested improvements to the ball fields for the community. We budgeted money for spring cleanup and we have recently been told that they were able to collect and dispose of 270 tons of garbage from our reservation. We are using some of this money to fix the LCO K-12 School for safety of students and visitors. We have been working on plans to improve our communities and help our businesses and programs. We are also working on a new community at the four corners of Schoolhouse and Froemel Road, that will include apartment building(s) to address our housing shortage. We are looking at improving the Pow wow grounds, playgrounds, boat landing, new Elderly Center, Fitness Center, Police Station, Gaming Commission building, infrastructure of water & sewer expansion, and many more needs that are being presented to us. We would like to thank the community members for their input on the surveys to get your priorities and your thoughts on needs of the tribe and communities.

This has been a long two years and with the CARES money from last year that we were able to apply for and receive last year to which we were under a time crunch of spending in 7 months. We were able to build a new Daycare that was so needed for our reservation, as well as a new firehall so the LCO School could have their building back to provide for more classrooms as their student enrollment had increased dramatically. We were able to give a stimulus check to our members and additional help with utilities, as well as purchase quarantine homes, purchase emergency public safety equipment and vehicles, along with so many other expenses including food for the community members during this time to help prevent people from being exposed to COVID-19.

We will be providing a full report of what was spent and how it was allowable under the funding that we received to the Membership very soon as our Response Team is able to.

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