Citizen Comment:
- The big topic of the night is the film studio to be built out in La Cima, and what kind of tax breaks they should get, and what kind of expectations should come along with it. Someone from SMRF spoke about holding them to high environmental standards. Another speaker spoke in favor of it.
- Rodrigo Amaya talked about one specific police officer who is known to racially profile and harass Hispanic community members at Rio Vista.
- Remember the dangerous intersection in front of the Methodist Church? That was on April 19th. There is now a stop sign, and the head of WalkSMTX came to profusively thank the city for their quick action. That is some responsive governance right there.
(Some financial reports, an annexation into La Cima which is just more houses and not the film studio.)
Item 29: ’22-’23 CBDG Grant Allocations
There is about $850K in Community Block Development Grant (CBDG) money to be allocated this August. Tuesday’s presentation gave preliminary recommendations about how to divvy it up. Applicants are the Hays-County Women’s Shelter, Habitat for Humanity, CASA, Salvation Army, about four different city programs, and Southside Community Center.
One of the city programs – the homebuyer assistance program – has been a flop, because there aren’t any affordable houses. So that is discussed, but not axed.
Max Baker tackles Southside Community Center. Basically, there are a lot of reasons to feel warmly towards Southside Community Center – they’ve been serving the homeless for a very long time, and doing so when no one else was. As Jude Prather put it, “their heart is in the right place.” There are also a lot of reasons to be critical of Southside – in recent years, it sounds like the director had his hands full with medical issues, and the management has fallen apart.
Southside asked for $115K of CBDG money, and staff is recommending $55K. However, Southside is apparently sitting on $392K, unspent, from prior years. Max Baker wants to know why we’re even considering giving them an additional 55K.
He starts by reading this bit that city staff posted to the message board, after Max asked about the $400k:
Staff: As a subrecipient, Southside is essentially a “staff extension” – they must handle a program exactly like staff would handle it. Staff is responsible for setting them up for success, ensuring they are trained. In 2019, all City staff responsible for development and oversight of the program left. In 2020, the HUD monitoring had an extensive 15 findings that included every part of the program – such as documenting whether contractors were procured competitively, whether homeowners received information appropriately, and what each expenditure included. HUD required that City staff completely rewrite the policies and procedures and retrain Southside. Staff also chose to take on some of the actions such as procuring contractors, in order to ensure it was done correctly. Southside has been on hold since, waiting for 1) policy and procedure rewrite 2) retraining 3) contractor procurement. In addition, Southside was responsible for the application intake and income verification process and that did not go well; staff has taken this over as well and is working to receive the correct income documentation from applicants.
Max goes on to say “…This is the first time I remember hearing that there is this large pot of money that is being unused because of Southside’s – I’m going to put it bluntly – incompetence in managing a program, or having the staff necessary, to deal with this. … If staff is doing so much of this work, why are we still working with Southside? My assumption is that it’s because they have the building.”
(The answer to this is supposed to be posted to the message boards, but it’s not up yet.)
As usual, Max is right, but kind of hostile and undiplomatic about it. Southside isn’t run by bad people. Staff is not bad people. Maybe we shouldn’t be awarding Southside more money at this moment, but maybe we can say it more nicely?
…
On a different note, Max Baker has an excellent suggestion that the CBDG money could be used to provide 24 hour restrooms available for homeless people and the general public. This is really important. We can ameliorate some of the worst difficulties of living on the streets, while simultaneously working to get people off the streets.
The San Marxist 