Providence Committee on URRP-4/10/2025-5:30 PM

Good

afternoon, everyone. You have joined the committee on revenue development renewal and planning. Today is Thursday, April 10. Madam clerk, please

call the roll. Chairwoman Mary Kay Harris? Present. Vice chair, Ron Pichardo?

Present.

Councilman John Rosales? Present. Councilwoman Adeha Reyes? Present. Councilwoman Ana Vargas is absent.

We have four pressed and one absent. We have a form.

Beautiful. So today, we're joined by Emily Freeman, Alicia. Alyssa? Alyssa. I don't know why I keep on calling.

Is that Alicia? Alyssa, and we have Kyle Nevada. We also have a new what's the name? Robert. I'm sorry.

Baptista.

Baptista. We

have our beautiful clerks. I won't go name her name. We have Ruth. Ruth, what's your last name? Cotia.

Cotia. City solicitor. Thank you for joining us tonight. Madam clerk, will you please read the first item into the docket?

Item number one, communication from his honor, the mayor, dated 03/28/2025, submitting the community development block grant budget for program year twenty twenty five dash twenty twenty six. The following has been invited for an overview. Emily Frittberg, director of housing and human services, department of housing and human services. Alicia McDermott, director of housing and community development, department of housing and human services.

Thank you. Let the record show that, counseling on on the is present.

No. Noted.

Alright. You know, every year, we get the opportunity here from our planning department. And right now, it's an opportunity here with the spring. It's all about any questions that the committee may have, or anything that you have that you feel very comfortable in asking, Emily and, Alyssa, please do so. And this is a time to return to get to Emily to get us starting on what this is in communication.

Madam Chair, can we enter her handout into the record as an exhibit?

To madam. What is this as entered as what?

Exhibit one. May I have

a motion? Motion to enter exhibit one for the record.

The motion made by councilwoman Gandalf, second by councilwoman Briggs. Incident to the record. Thank you.

Welcome, Emily. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Mike Freeman, director

of housing and human services. Melissa McDermott, director of housing and Canadian development.

Pleased to join you this evening to manage that division. She's a great example of the type of employee and talent we've been working to recruit in the department in first year, those sort of skillful public administrators with direct frontline service backgrounds. So she's going to be your primary point of contact in the latter part of this process

for. So

to give an overview of this budget, this is gonna be the first year of investment under a new consolidated plan. So every five years, we are charged by HUD with updating our goals and objectives and priorities. So this will be a '25 2025 to 2029 consolidated plan. So what we are doing right now and have them doing is intensive community engagement, a detailed market and needs analysis, and the review and access receiving the review of our some access and barriers to fair housing here in. So after updating and staffing those needs, we're charged by HUD with them selecting the highest quality services to meet those priority community needs for the best price.

So we, knowing that those sort of needs were obviously, you know, over a five to ten year period have not changed, affordable housing, basic needs, addressing homelessness, those are all still goals that resonate with our community, and are still. So we released our RFP, our notice of funding availability in February, and we received almost 100 worthwhile proposals. So, of course, we have some incredibly difficult decisions, due to that tremendous level of ask and our limited availability. Funding is anticipated to be reduced from the prior year as we are operating on now a federal continuing resolution, which effectively means that the top line budget figures at HUD have been copied and pasted and carried into FY '25. So best case scenario is we're looking at level funding, but more likely, it's anywhere between a five to 10% cut by the time we actually receive those allocations from HUD.

We have operated in this environment before. Very often, we are developing this budget with a hypothetical allocation funds. So we do have protocols and procedures that allow us to get through this local budget process and establish our sort of list of priority activities, and then we do an equitable pro rata adjustment when we finally hear from the federal government our actual $5 figures. Right now, that's tracking to look like late mid to early May. So, typically, by the council has already passed it out, we will then need to make those final adjustments to reflect actually.

In total, we received a staggering 20,500,000 in request. I think that's the most of the highest figure we've received during my tenure here at the city. About $12,300,000 in CBD alone. And our job this year, you know, the outlook for our local nonprofit is gonna be particularly challenging as we all know whether we navigate the federal funding landscape that is changing daily. And so with that in mind, when the mayor cracks with this budget to input a staff, we identified funding essentially that's gonna be for those services and activities that ensure that our most most basic needs are met.

So those are needs such as food and childcare, homelessness prevention and response, and refugee services, all of which are struggling right now to sustain their operations and baseline service delivery. We do not feel it was an appropriate moment given federal uncertainty to explore things like pilots or new initiatives given that we don't know, yeah, '26, '27, or '28. So when we also looked at facility and housing proposals, we recommended recommended those that are addressing those critical operational barriers or concerns. So projects seeking, you know, to improve their fire safety, to mitigate winter floods, and to generate new housing units that are gonna serve our lowest income. And then I will turn it over to Alyssa to sort of walk through the mayor's budget.

Folks are prepared to move through the mayor's draft budget.

Okay. When we were developing this budget, we decided to put, as Emily said, emphasis on fairly defined projects that are already ready to proceed. We were looking for a direct line between our CPD investment and the eligible clients that are being served. A lot of the recommendations are direct service to compliance or spaces that need to be improved that serve those clients as well. And all of the recommendations also move clearly international objective.

So the goal, as you know, this committee is to work collaboratively to get a budget into our final form, and then it will go to our city council passage twice. The budget will then be incorporated into a final annual action plan to be put out for a thirty day public comment period, and then it'll be submitted to HUD for approval. We need to make sure that we have these steps completed and these approvals in place by July 1 to avoid any disruptions in services. So when looking at the budget, we do have some funds available from previous, like, years, and these are either due to projects that we're not able to move forward or even projects that were came in under budget. So that or as well as program income.

And with those funds, we're able to reallocate into new projects this year. We do have some fixed expenses such as the admin percentage. This is set by OMB. And then we also have public services, which are also have a percentage that that can be served. Both the community centers and the public service fall under this path, and the path is about 1,069,000.

We do have some economic development projects on there. A lot of these programs are tech technical assistance and investments to serve low to moderate micro businesses or small businesses with the goal of job creation and retention. There is no cap on this category. We do have public facilities. These are for nonprofit or city owned facilities that are open and available for the public.

They must serve with other income clientele, or they must be open to in a low to moderate income neighborhood. These are libraries, playgrounds, shelters, community centers, etcetera. And there's also, again, no cap on this category. And then moving forward, we do have the board allocations. These funds are made available to identify eligible projects in each of your awards.

Prior to passage from this committee, we will need to identify projects and incorporate this into the ordinance that we'll bring to city council. I will be working with Kyle and I know he's been in touch with many of you to try and identify these projects. And if you're ever struggling with any project ideas, the department directors would be more than willing to give you suggestions as well. Please let myself know or Emily while she's still here if we can assist or support you in any way. We we are hoping to have these work projects identified before the passage out of our committee at the end of this month So we can build that into our annual action plan for HUD approval and then pass it out by the docket deadline of May 9.

And then if you're looking at the continue continuing through the budget, we do have our home investment partnership program. We have 1,121,000 for the development of affordable and rental homeownership housing. We do not define land items in this category because of specific home regulations. We are not able to identify projects award award amounts in the ordinance because we will end up filing any home regulations set by HUD. We're not able to make any type of binding commitments with these funds until we have underwriting, subsidy layering, project assessment occurring first, and that's why there are no, like, specific line items in this category as of now.

We also received a prepayment from a developer, which has been requested to be rolled into the a new loan for the Lockwood Plaza 2 project, and that was also approved by this committee last year. And then we do have our emergency solutions grant funds. Those are in

the amount of 450,000.

Those are usually used for shelter operation, rapid rehousing, and other essential services. These funds are deployed through our consolidated homeless fund consortium. By being part of this part of this consortium, we are able to meet the 100% nonfederal match requirements, and it also helps us foster a continuum of shelter providers and services as well. And then lastly, we have our or housing opportunities for persons with AIDS in the amount of about 1,400,000. These funds will be used for supportive services, tenant based rental assistance, and project based housing for people living with HIV and AIDS in Providence, MSA, which also includes Bristol County area as well.

So when we were developing this process, we did have a really robust outreach process. We sent out a digital notice via our listserv email with any due dates, links to register for our webinar, as well as a link to the notice of funding of it funding availability. On that list, we have over 1,400 emails, and then all of you the council emails are part of that list as well. We did post on the city website. We work with community relations as well as the mayor's newsletter.

We also put a notice in the Providence Journal. We had an application workshop and q and a in early February, which was recorded and also posted on the city website on on the housing human services page. And then we also take applications through our web web grant system. And in that system, anyone applying for these funds will get email reminders to complete and submit on time. The city, we have a well established web based application system for our competitive tools of our funding, which is the web current system.

And all of these applications that are submitted are evaluated and scored by staff, and they are evaluated based on the following criteria. Number of clients served, priority for equity and access, targeting the areas of concentrated poverty and priority populations, any previous awards, past performance, and compliance with requirements, agency capacity and staff expertise for projects, conformance with the five year consolidated plan goals and priorities that were identified, evaluation of cost reasonable reasonableness and effectiveness. And prior to rating applications, our grantees must identify meet a minimum scoring thresholds before we conduct a further analysis on their application. And we are working collaboratively with the city council to shift to more impactful investments to boost program impact and efficiency. We are looking to prioritize transform transformational phase based projects that improve quality of life or service impact in underserved areas.

And we also kept in mind any parallel funding opportunities such as city budget grants that these individuals already received, any opiate settlement funds, etcetera, when crafting our strategy to maximize leverage and ensure all of our key key priorities are met. Now open up for questions if anyone has any.

This is very good questions for the committee.

Morning. Thank you, During the process I'll take it back. That's fine. During the process, the organization that applied to is not a requirement to meet with with you first or the or come to a meeting.

We do not need one on one typically during the procurement process. What we try to do is have it be as open and fair as possible, and so everyone is getting the same information. That said, eleven months out of the year, what we offer are if you've applied before and not been successful, or if you just simply wanna meet with us eleven months out of the year, we will take meetings with grantees and highly encourage it. During the application process, when that ceremony will be live, we typically will handle questions through the workshop and then sort of any sort of agenda and the. And if they have technical questions on how to apply, things like deadlines, we'll be certainly answering those.

And those are not is not part of the scoring in terms of the engagement meeting.

We do not sort of mandate any meetings. What we do see and always encourage and why we communicate the opportunity to debrief is that the for those organizations that continue to engage with us, we do see increases in education for the next four year over year.