Tag: CBDG

Hour 1-2, 6/7/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

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. 

July 6th City Council Meeting, (Part 2)

by The San Marxist, posted in Meetings

The next recurring theme was a large amount of money to be allocated, across different items.

  • Items 35-36, $9 million from American Rescue Plan Fund (and it sounds like there will be 9 million more, next summer.)
  • Item 40, $800K in CBDG proposals for the 21-22 fiscal year
  • Item 41, $1 million in utility assistance

So these were quite a lot of fun – feeling flush with cash and able to grant all the wishes to all these nonprofits. Down with austerity and belt-tightening!

  1. On the first, the American Rescue Plan Fund:

– they argued about whether tourism and marketing should get quite such a big cut. It seems that this sector is limited in where they can seek funds, and they did take quite a hit during COVID. But maybe not quite as much as was proposed. ($282K)

– they argued a bit about Briarwood, a neighborhood outside of city limits that suffers severe flooding, in part because of how San Marcos has been developing. There’s a 2.5 million stormwater mitigation project there. They managed to thread the needle on that one – postpone it by three months and fund it from several spots.

– A lot of small projects got some money: Southside Community Center, bilingual outreach and communications, KZSM, vaccination outreach, Nosotros la Gente, which provides shoes for local kids. Good feelings all around.

2. On the CBDG funds, nearly everything got funded besides Roland Saucedo’s proposal, which is seeemingly why they chipped in for him in the previous funds.

3. The Utility Assistance fund is interesting. They’ve paid out about 20% of what’s available, and they’re all concerned that people aren’t applying. City staff was put on the defensive about their outreach efforts.

– Everyone who is past due gets a letter with info on how to apply. If the city has an email address, they send an email too.
– The city has reached out to the Food Bank and SMCISD.
– The application was made fairly short – just one page.
– Disconnections have been suspended during the pandemic, but there will be a date set to resume disconnections.

Criticisms:

– how about going through the churches? Commissioner Gonzalez says that he has to KEEP directing city to this and they never do.
– Commissioner Gleason, Commissioner Derrick, and Mayor Hughson all feel like until you send them notice of disconnection, no one will be very motivated to apply.
– Commissioner Garza talks about how people (meaning the Hispanic community) are more likely to just tighten their belts, out of not wanting to take more than their fair share, and that they’ll want to save the funds for someone who REALLY needs it.

Commissioner Scott, actually, was strongest on this: “Can’t we just see who is past due and pay off their balance without them having to apply?”

Hughson concern-trolled about undeserving people who have the money and could pay. Nothing Texas hates more than someone receiving some crumbs when they could have scraped by without them. Garza is enthusiastic about this proposal.

Scott’s proposal – just pay off the deliquent accounts – has to be put on the agenda and brought back as an item, because it didn’t fit onto the existing agenda. So it still could happen.

…

As an aside: there’s an ongoing dynamic where City Council and Lumbreras are perpetually exasperated with each other. It goes like this:

  1. Council frequently acts like he has done something incompetent.
  2. He then defensively retorts that they tied his hands in the way they made the request.

I am not sure yet who is being a jerk, or if there’s blame to spread to both. Mayor Hughson herself is a generally prickly person, and it often doesn’t mean anything.

…

All three topics will be finalized at some point in August.