Travis County Commissioners Court
October 17, 2006
Item 12
We have human services here, so number 12 is to receive and discuss the letter from u.s. Department of housing and urban development advising of significant reduction. And amount of community development block grant, cdbg allocation to Travis County. I did advise our staff that only three are here today, and did think we ought to lay this out, though, and look at the different options and plan to take action next week when we will have four.
>> thank you, judge. Good morning, judge, Commissioners, sherry fleming, executive manager for health and human service and veteran service, and as did he described in the agenda item, we're here to officially provide notice to the court of a letter we received from the u.s. Department of housing and urban development indicating that an error was made in commuting the allocation for Travis County. That robber was described as a human error which basically caused a portion of population that should have been removed from our calculation because it is part of the city of Austin to be included in our calculation which resulted in a higher amount than the statutorily required calculations would have yielded had it been done correctly. So therefore, our allocation has been reduced -- well, our -- first of all, our consolidated plan has been disallowed because of the erroneous amount, and our allocation now stands at 838,659. And so today briefly staff wanted to give you a visual representation of that, so you have a pretty colorful slide there that basically shows you the differences in the allocation amount. You notice in the kind of baby blue color is the administration and planning portion is reduced now from 48 9,000 to 169 and some change there, the public services area, from 374,901, to 0,125,728, then the portion represented by the yellow section from 1.5 million to about 545,000. So significant reduction in the amount of money that we've been working with. Also in --
>> okay. Now, these new allocations were derived --
>> based on --
>> in what manner?
>> there is a calculation that is statutorily required by congress that involves looking at population figures, and we do not have the detail of that, however, the representatives from the u.s. Department of housing and urban development from dc are expected to be here with you next week and so...
>> yeah, but I mean the -- if we have $838,000 and, by the way, in my view, notwithstanding the substantial reduction, it is still money. So... We ought to use it to achieve as much public good as possible. But I'm just trying to understand, okay, if we -- so our 1.5 million becomes 545, so is that another formula that is required by the federal government?
>> yes. This is the same percentages that staff discussed with you from the beginning.
>> okay.
>> I believe it's 20% admin, 15% in the public services area, and then the remainder which is about 65% --
>> 65 on community development.
>> right.
>> okay.
>> so that would be the percentages that hud dictates on how we spend our dollars.
>> well, here is my suggestion to the court to think about between now and next year -- next week. And that is that if we only have 800 plus thousand dollars, whether the county can just absorb whatever administrative costs there are, whether we can try to put the 838,000 into some sort of direct services, see what I'm saying?
>> right.
>> and, umm, yeah... That's just -- let's just think about that, don't have to land on it today but --
>> and staff, we are running numbers which look at projects which may be could be run by county departments as opposed to maybe contractors or recipients and the administrative burden, you know, one way or the other. So those are some of the scenarios that we are running. What we did want to spend just a minute with the court on today because it would impact your discussions for next week.
>> okay.
>> and that would be what we consider to be some negotiation points that the court might want to consider when the hud representatives are present. And those are, first of all, the request for them to consider reimbursement for the pre-award costs, as you know, prior to the end of the fiscal year, the court voted to absorb those costs in general funds out of the health and human services budget, so we were going forward, not charging those to the community development block grant award, so that would be a point that we might -- that we feel might be important just in terms of good faith, because I believe the county proceeded in good faith to do those processes that would be dictated by an allocation of $2.4 million, the other would be to request consideration of additional dollars to cover costs related to the expenses of the revision. So here again, another good faith demonstration on the part of hud. What we feel to be the most critical negotiation points, however, is the request of a waiver of the regulation restricting the revision be done -- the revisions to be 45 day, based on the consolidated plan that we prepared, we have told our community that we will provide them an opportunity to comment if there are substantial revisions to our plan, and certainly a two-thirds reduction is a substantial revision to the plan, and so the 45 days would not allow you sufficient period for public comment, which is required to be 30 days. So we have a proposed time line that we provided to you that we are hoping to have hud approve which would permit us to have an opportunity to let the community know about the differences and what we intend to do with them, and then --
>> I'm sorry, related to getting into another round of the public hearing process, the thing that really irritates me, the first time around, is how much very expensive advertising that we had to put out for basically public hearings where we had a minuscule number of folks in comparison to the number of folks who are in this county compared to say, our bond meetings that we would hold, et cetera. Is there some kind of requirement in terms of how we do our advertising because when we're talking about this little amount of money to have to spend 20 and $30,000 to readvertise public hearings, which is basically through no fault of our open, which is basically to narrow the scope, we're going to have to pick and choose and just narrow it, do we have to go through that same expensive advertising?
>> no, Commissioner, not at all, and what we are suggesting is a 30 day public comment period with one potential public hearing here at Commissioner's court, that would be, you know, we would put it up and put the revised plan in the same locations we put the initial plan and of course have it available on our website, but, no, we are not close to that initial public hearing process.
>> if I may, though, we actually are required to publicize in a newspaper of general circulation about the public hearing. We have dramatically reduced by strategically choosing papers that will target our audience, now we can do advertising for $5,000 or under. But we do have to advertise in a newspaper circulation.
>> which would include the Austin chronicle.
>> yes, correct.
>> and then finally, sorry, barney. Finally, a request that would begin after hud improved our provisions and basically the timeliness clock refers to a requirement that as of actually October 1, we would be -- the clock would have begun in terms of determining whether we are spinding our funding in a timely manner, and because we are, we do not have an approved plan, it is impossible for us to be spending our money, and so this would be once again another critical point for hud to reset that clock after they have approved our plan so that the community is not penalized by an October 1 start date. And if you would flip over and look at the time line revision, basically what staff has done is prepared a time line to kind of demonstrate to you the milestones that we would have to hit and why this particular revision time line is most -- most preferred in terms of getting this process done for our community to have or opportunity to review our changes and -- and get started with the program.
>> and if I may make a couple of comments, in terms of this time line, we are actually going to have to request a waiver from hud, our 45 day clock in terms of revision may have started September 25th. It may have started October 9th. Or it may start October 24th, and hud is still negotiating what that means for them, but what we do know is that to be compliant with our participation plan of 45 day revision window is not possible. Hud is amenable to the revision. They are okay with us proposing our own time line, and giving us a waiver for that regulation.
>> so those are the things that we feel are most key and in terms of any discussion that we might have with these hud representatives all next week, those last two points we believe will be most critical in terms of the community I think having a reasonable opportunity to make a revision and then move forward with the project.
>> so in our three new buckets with the new amount, the only one that we have complete control over is the light blue one? Administration and planning?
>> no, sir, you are not required to expand your 15% in public service. You could put all of the dollars into community development projects. But at a minimum, 65% of your funding has to go to community development, but you're not required to -- you're not required to reimburse yourself for administration and planning and you're not required to do public service projects.
>> okay. So in terms of how to determine the best way to use the $838,000, what options do we have, have we given any of those consideration other than what you just said?
>> community development, the community development area presents the most attractive options in that a lot of the project costs -- or a lot of things that might normally be considered administration costs actually become project costs, so you do not incurred a additional administration expenses. So community development is certainly probably the most fruitful area for the court to be able to address the issues that were identified in your plan, things like rental housing, affordable housing, water and wastewater projects, those things, certainly community development presents the most fruit fruitful opportunities for you to stay in alignment with your consolidated plan.
>> and if the could would like, we actually are in the process of listing out essentially the projects that we had outlined, what kind of impact can they have for the dollar amount that we are now going to receive, if we're going narrow our strategic direction from the broad strategy that we had with $2.4 million, what are some of the narrowing that we can do, and what does that look like? How can that play out over a five year period? And if you would like for us to do so, we can provide that backup and documentation for you by the end of the week.
>> I'm going to make this real easy for folks to take off the table. I've already had discussions with karin langley over at family elder care, and they were -- they would always love the opportunity to have an opportunity during the midst of a capital campaign right now related to their headquarters, they said if this got deferred to another year, they would not have an issue with that, so I visited with them about that, and they would love the opportunity in the future, but if that is something that is needed to make it work, that is something that they would not have issues with.
>> what we also expect to provide you in terms of an option would be projects that you could go forward with in this year but then projects that could drop to the second year, and so you actually would accomplish not only revising your first year plans but also getting a head start on your second year plan, and so those options -- but, I guess what we've heard from your discussion today and what has been very beneficial is that certainly the court has an interest in continuing and then you are at least willing to consider looking at the general fund to take on the admin costs, so that -- that in itself is critical in how we can go forward to propose projects to you, because we will identify for you the administrative impact both ways, should you charge to the grant, should you decide to absorb it by general fund, but -- but clearly, the community development is probably the most fruitful area in terms of reducing your administrative burden, the public service area, as we pointed out previously, requires monitoring and, you know, tracking of those -- those agencies that will receive those dollars that kind of feed into some administrative costs that we can't avoid.
>> one other thing I think we ought to look at is what projects are likely to have the most impact?
>> right.
>> then which ones are likely to either complement other funding or provide really model collaboration.
>> right.
>> potential for us.
>> right. And we also --
>> and kristi and mick were employees before this came up, right.
>> that's correct, judge.
>> we have other work to do if they're not spending full time on this grant?
>> that would be correct.
>> okay. So that's what I would say. It kind of boils down to, if we go from 2.4 million to 800,000 plus, how do we spend it to have maximum positive impact?
>> and just another note on the revisions, we want to be really responsive to what we identify in the needs assessment as being the most critical needs in Travis County, so we want to make sure as we're narrowing our focus to narrow in on where the county really needed the dollars to be spent, the majority of the money. So we'll be going back to poll some of the biggest learnings from our needs assessment and bringing those back to you when we bring our recommendation.
>> okay. Now, mr. Brogone or somebody in his office has agreed to come down and chat with us.
>> yes.
>> so the question is whether we want to confirm him or whether we want to authorize kristi and meg to have an off the record phone conversation with him regarding the mistake.
>> well, I do know that one of their interests was to be able to officially apologize to the court and this community for what they, you know, certainly see is a tremendous error and -- and certainly resulted in a lot of investment and work on our part.
>> should we assume that the accurate calculation will result in us receiving roughly the same amount of money in the future if any?
>> that will be the assumption, we've learned since we've made friends in this area that they have been experiencing actually about a 10% reduction each year, and so -- but I think we were originally instructed by hud san antonio that to base our projections on the existing amount and project that out over the years, but -- but it would not be a surprise if we experienced a 10% reduction.
>> no reason to dream of the $2.4 million miraculously reappearing.
>> not at this time, judge.
>> okay.
>> I think christian had one of the best memos that I read that rather than us dwelling on what clearly was an unfortunate error in terms of how the calculation occur, rather than focusing on it's a loss of a certain amount of dollars, it is still 800, almost $900,000 in dollars that can be invested in this community to do good work, and we should proceed ahead in terms of saying, great, let's go spend it, and not focus on the other.
>> they're sorry, I get it.
>> we gather great information that will inform not only this process but other initiatives of health and human services and this court so I would agree. We will get you draft of potential projects as quickly as possible. We will begin sending those to you on e-mail, and then we'll have them maybe more concise should you have time to discuss them next Tuesday.
>> okay. Anybody else here on this item? Joe, will you...
>>
>> [inaudible]
>> okay. Okay, we'll have it back on next week.
>> thank you.
>> thank y'all very much.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 4:29 PM