Travis County Commissioners Court
January 21, 2009
Item 14
14 is consider appeared take appropriate action on the following items related to the planning for the program year 2009 action plan for the community development blank grant funds received from the u.s. Department of housing and urban development. A, public hearing dates for the public to provide input on the community needs. What dates are proposed?
>> good morning. Travis County receives community development block grant funds from the u.s. Department of housing and urban development. This will begin our year four planning for our cdbg plan. And so its program year '09, and every year we have a series of public hearings to receive comments from the public about their needs. We are proposing the dates that Commissioners court be Tuesday, February 17th at nine a.m. Also at the Travis County community center in Pflugerville on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. At the west rural community center on Thursday, February 19th at 6:30 p.m. At the south rural community center on Thursday, February 26th at 6:30 p.m. And finally at the tnr satellite office 1 on Thursday, February 26th at 6:30 p.m. We're requesting approval of those public hearing dates to be able --
>> how will the folks are notified for these public hearings?
>> so what we'll do is once we get court approval for these dates, then we will put ads in the papers in the communities that are outlined in the city of Austin. We also put it on channel 17. We second letters out to anyone who has participated previously in a public hearing process. We put it on the website. We send it out to social service agencies and various listservs. Then we can also provide it to y'all's offices. And we actually have located some different places as we've gone out into the communities. We have found either churches or libraries in different areas and we're going to start posting fliers there this year to try to increase the participation.
>> move approval of the public hearing dates.
>> second.
>> discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. B, advertisements announcing in newspapers of general circulation the public hearing dates.
>> and so what we'll be doing is taking an english and spanish atd and putting it in newspapers of general circulation. We have the plan out laid in terms of how we'll do the spanish ads. We actually target some spanish newspapers and then there will be english ads in most of the other newspapers.
>> and you have a budget.
>> we do.
>> that's why I move approval.
>> second.
>> discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. C, project selection criteria.
>> every year we ask that the court approve the project selection criteria before we ask for input from citizens and county departments. What we did was we pacifically used last year's selection criteria, but we exiend two of them -- we combined two of them into one because they were both looking at timeliness. What we're recommending is that the court approve addressing a high priority goal in the strategic plan, the feasibility of the project, which means that the project will be able to be completed in 12 to 18 months, so it's a project that can be implemented fairly quickly and spend down money fairly quickly. Also that the project will impact a significant number of households. In the past we don't actually identify what a significant number means because a significant impact could be an area getting water, and even though it serves a small amount of people, that's still a significant impact. Also, we're saying that we would like to look at the benefits low to moderate income persons and then finally prioritize projects that leverage or match funds from another source. So there's five criteria that we're asking you to approve today.
>> we've used them before.
>> we have used them before. We don't assign points, we just let you know the numbers so you can see the information based on these criteria.
>> they've searched us well.
>> -- they've served us well.
>> that is correct.
>> I move approval.
>> second.
>> discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you very much.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, January 21, 2009 2:03 PM