Wilton Faces Potential $500K Funding Gap After CFO Says ARPA Money Can’t Cover Guy Whitten Field Work

Months after completing the installation of new lights and renovations to the natural grass playing surface at Guy Whitten Field, the town has learned that due to an administrative error, the federal funds originally earmarked for the project cannot be used to pay for the work, according to Chief Financial Officer Dawn Savo. Wilton may now need to find roughly $500,000 from somewhere else to cover the shortfall.

According to Savo, the auditors working on the town’s long-delayed financial audit for Fiscal Year 2025 determined that the required contract for the work was not in place by Dec. 31, 2024 — the federal deadline for committing American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) infrastructure funds.

Savo disclosed the discovery “in the interest of transparency” during the Oct. 13 meeting of Wilton’s Board of Finance (BOF) and provided additional details during the Oct. 27 meeting of the BOF’s Audit Remediation and Financial Reporting Subcommittee.

The disclosure is another indication of how the town’s troubled financial management controls have affected the completion of key infrastructure projects, and raises questions about how the town proceeded with the field improvements without confirming that the anticipated federal funding could cover the work — and how replacing that money would affect other town finances.

Possible Solution: ARPA Funds to New Police HQ, FEMA Funds to Guy Whitten Field?

At the Oct. 13 BOF meeting, Savo explained that the ARPA funds could be preserved if the town moved them to another project that had a contract in place by the end of 2024.

“The only [project] that I could find was the police building,” Savo said, referring to the recently completed Wilton Police Department headquarters. “It had a contract in place. We did use a small amount of ARPA [funds] for it, $611,000.”

Savo had more details to share about the proposed funding transfer — and a possible source for at least some replacement funding for the Guy Whitten Field project — at the Oct. 27 meeting of the audit subcommittee.

“One of the things that I noticed when we did the audit this year was [that] we had a [Federal Emergency Management Agency] grant and it was a reimbursement, a very old reimbursement for general fund expenses” dating from the COVID pandemic, Savo explained. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is really old. I don’t know why we got it so late.'”

Savo suggested that the FEMA reimbursement, which totaled more than $400,000, could help cover the Guy Whitten Field expenses that officials had expected ARPA to pay.

“I feel like there’s that $450[,000] [that] could be a solution for this problem,” Savo told the committee.

While the precise amount of unused ARPA funds allocated to the Guy Whitten Field renovations has not been confirmed, GOOD Morning Wilton‘s review of past meeting minutes and supporting documentation suggests that it could be as high as $515,700.

Of that, a June 2025 memo listed $469,385 remaining after engineering expenses. The amount that now needs replacement funding remains unconfirmed, including whether ARPA can cover the engineering expenses already incurred.

GMW has reached out to Savo and First Selectman Toni Boucher seeking the actual amount of ARPA funding allocated to the project, its total cost, how much has been invoiced and paid, and who was responsible for confirming the funding was available before the town spent the money. This story will be updated with their responses when received.

How the Field Project Was Funded

Federal regulations specify that ARPA fund recipients were required to “obligate” them — that is, apply them to a formal contract — by Dec. 31, 2024, and used no later than Dec. 31, 2026. A reconstruction of the chain of events from meeting minutes, statements and documents suggests that bureaucratic hurdles and a muddled fiscal internal review and approval process contributed to the town missing the 2024 obligation deadline.

The money trail begins in October 2023, when the Board of Selectmen (BOS) voted to reallocate $500,000 from the town’s ARPA and infrastructure funds away from proposed improvements to the drainage system for Middlebrook School‘s athletic fields and put them toward new lighting at Guy Whitten Field.

In his November 2025 project summary, Parks and Recreation Department Director Steve Pierce said he had raised concerns about field repairs and the lack of irrigation when the Parks and Recreation Commission recommended prioritizing the lighting project.

Pierce’s summary also states that an additional $182,000 was later added to the project from the Infrastructure Fund.

A document provided to GMW tracking the status of ARPA fund allocations dated Nov. 23, 2023, shows that $265,700 in federal funds was transferred from the planned improvements to the sports fields at Middlebrook School to Guy Whitten lighting at the time.

A year-and-a-half later, at its June 3, 2025, meeting, the BOS voted to shift an additional $250,000 in ARPA funds from the canceled Schenck’s Island playground project to the Guy Whitten Field improvement project.

In his memo recommending that transfer, then-Town Administrator Matt Knickerbocker explicitly noted that ARPA funds could only be applied to projects that were under contract by the end of December 2024. He recommended transferring the playground funds to Guy Whitten, and the BOS approved the transfer 5–0.

Knickerbocker’s memo showed how the town expected to pay for the project. Of the original $265,700 ARPA allocation, $219,385 remained after deducting $46,315 in engineering expenses. The additional $250,000 playground money transfer brought the remaining ARPA funding to $469,385.

The funding plan estimated the total project cost at $682,000, with the remaining $212,615 to come from the Infrastructure Fund. It projected that $203,685 in infrastructure funding would remain unallocated.

The June 3 meeting minutes also record then-Selectwoman Kim Healy saying that reallocating infrastructure funds for the project needed to be added to a future BOS agenda.

What remains unclear is why officials determined at the time that Guy Whitten met the contract requirement when they approved the ARPA transfer — and how much funding must now come from another source.

There are also expenses to reconcile. At a November 2025 BOS meeting, Pierce reported that $43,318 in design costs had already been paid to Waterfield Design Group. Officials have not explained how that figure relates to the $46,315 in engineering expenses listed in Knickerbocker’s earlier memo or which funding sources covered subsequent work — as well as who authorized it.

What Did Contracts Cover?

In early April 2024 the town issued a request for proposals (RFP) for “engineering services for renovation of the natural grass field, installation of LED field lighting and installation of an irrigation system” at Guy Whitten Field. The RFP specified that the budget for the project was $680,000 “to include design and construction, including all regulatory approvals.”

Only one company, Waterfield Design Group, Inc., of Winchester, Mass., responded to the RFP.

Boucher signed an agreement with Waterfield on May 23, 2024 — without prior approval of the BOS.

Pierce later said the contract was sent to Town Counsel for review and finalized on June 19, 2024, and Pierce later took the blame for the oversight of not seeking BOS approval.

The BOS eventually voted to retroactively approve the agreement at its Dec. 1, 2025, meeting.

The minutes and transcript of the Dec. 1 meeting show that the board erroneously referred to the agreement as “the Waterfield Design Contract of June 19, 2024.” The document shows Boucher’s signature was dated May 23, 2024, while its first page also carries a notation that it was produced on June 18, 2024.

Those dates place the design agreement before the ARPA obligation deadline identified by Savo. What remains unanswered is why that agreement did not establish the commitment needed to use the anticipated ARPA funding for the field improvements.

The Waterfield agreement distinguishes Waterfield’s professional design services from the construction work. It lists an overall project budget of $680,000, including an estimated $86,100 for design fees and reimbursable expenses. That left $593,900 for construction and regulatory approvals.

In other words, the agreement described the budget for the entire project, but that does not establish that it committed the town to purchase all the equipment or construction work.

The distinction matters because at the same Dec. 1, 2025 meeting at which the BOS retroactively approved the Waterfield agreement, it approved a separate $380,000 purchase agreement with Musco Sports Lighting, LLC, for lighting equipment.

That equipment approval came nearly a year after the deadline Savo said applied to committing the ARPA funds.

GMW is seeking clarification about which documents the auditors reviewed and the specific reason the anticipated federal funding could not be applied to the project.

Unanswered Questions Remain

By the time Guy Whitten Field reopened in time for the July Fourth fireworks earlier this year, followed a few weeks later by the activation of the lights, it had been a little over two years since the date on the initial agreement with Waterfield Design Group.

In his November 2025 project summary, Pierce described several obstacles to moving the lighting project forward, including confusion over whether the 70-foot-tall lights required a zoning variance from the town Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) or a change to the municipal lighting regulations by the Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z).

P&Z ultimately approved the regulations update and a special permit for the lights in November 2025.

Plenty of questions remain about the town’s review and approval process. Officials still need to establish how much money the town has spent so far on the Guy Whitten Field renovations and which funds have paid for the work, as well as how the expenses and shortfall will be covered and whether the FEMA reimbursement can be used.

Officials will also have to determine what approvals would be required to carry out Savo’s proposal and whether those funding changes would create a shortfall elsewhere.

With the year-end use-or-lose deadline for spending ARPA funds looming, time is running out for the answers.