Live reporting by
Ayanna Rose Banks
Cleveland has 7 years to spend CDBG money, official says
asrosedevelopes
@asrosedevelopes
Hi, I'll be tweeting this morning's Cleveland City Council Development, Planning and Sustainability Committee: Community Development Block Grant Hearing✨for #CLEdocumenters 📷@CLEdocumenters &
@signalcleveland
@signalcleveland
05:46 PM May 28, 2024 CDT
@cledocumenters @signalcleveland Councilmen Kerry McCormack expressed looking forward to opening the riverfront for public access
Councilmen Danny Kelly expressed wanting to see what affordable housing will look like in CBL project
Alyssa Hernandez, director of community development, was joined by assistant dir.'s Anthony Scott and Mikiel Wackers and Jeff Kucharski, budget manager, for the CDBG presentation
This year they have been given the numbers for their budget upfront
This slide is to show what the community development department does and their partners
They had a lot of positions to fill and have been doing so successfully
They now have online applications for Tax abatement and land bank and others are being tested.
They put their management through a 4 day, lean sigma six training course to train their program managements on how to assess their own programs and improve them.
historical allocation of funds for each grant. We have 2.2 million less than last year total
HUD limits 15% of the overall grant to go to public service. our cap is a little higher because we are grandfathered in
Wacker: Our cap is based on what we spent in 1983. Our number is around 25% or 4.4 million of our grant. without the grandfathering our 15% would be around 3 million.
Dir. Hernandez: When the city gets the CDBG dollars they have 7 years to spend these dollars. We will spend the oldest of the dollars (from 2017) first and work our way forward.
Jenny Spenser commented that she is not very happy with the decrease in funds for the HOME program and with inflation the hit is even bigger
The question was asked how the fund are allocated to different communities.
There is no evenly split 17 communities except with the NDA program
Councilman Richard Starr asked, During budgeting time they were told the 15 million dollar arbor request that had been passed back in august will be here by April of this year, do they have updates?
Hernandez: We will be doing announcements in the next two months.
Starr: Why is the home repair program taking so long? and how can we get the Slavic village area these fund?
Hernandez: We have been working on hiring. We have to work with 6 different programs and we are working hard to figure out the right way to spend the money
Starr commented that his community is struggling to get help from these programs
Philosophical change: residents don't care how their home gets repaired as long as it gets done.
Hernandez: They are focusing on production and handling contractor will be handled by one implementation contractor.
Anthony Scott Assistant dir. issued an apology to the residents of the city for the way things have been working historically
Joe Jones makes a point that we should be trying to "give a little to a lot" and only worry about the most pressing issues that are brought to the department so we can help more people in less time.
Hernandez replies that sometimes residents don't know when something needs to be done and if they go to help with one issue and see another big issue it's their responsibility to fix both issues for that resident
Jenny Spenser asked when the universal application will be launched
The answer was hopefully within the next month, after testing
Councilmen Kris Harsh asked, they have done this before with a different project, How is the implementation vendor going to pay the contractors if they will need to be reimbursed
Ass. Dir. Scott answered that they are already in the process of picking an implementation vendor and one of the main requirements of the applicants is having the fund and credit to pay the contractors , while they wait to be reimbursed
Separate from the General Fund budget hearings held in February, the annual CDBG budget hearings hone in on federal grants the city can receive from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Have questions? Think we got something wrong? Send any inquiries on the meeting or these tweets to
@cledocumenters Or email us at cledocumenters@gmail.com
@cledocumenters Or email us at cledocumenters@gmail.com