UURP | Regular Meeting | April 13th, 2026 | 5:30pm

We're done. We're ready to start. K. The committee of urban development and renewal planning, you know, I've let it be tight. It is now fall to order.

Today is Monday, April 19. Madam clerk, please call the roll.

Chairwoman Harris? Present. Vice chair Pichardo? Present. Councilman Consoles is absent.

Councilwoman Graves is also absent. Councilwoman Vargas? How present? Three present, two absent. We have a quorum.

Thank you so much. And the record show that we have majority leader, Esquimon, and then our councilman Marcus. So the last of the Marcus have joined us, please. Let's hear the first item on the doctor.

Item number one, communication from his honor, the mayor dated 03/27/2026, submitting the community development block grant budget for program year 2026 to 2027. The following has been invited for an overview. Emily Friedman, director, division of community development, department of planning and development. Alyssa McDermott, director of housing and community development, department of housing and human services. Thank you.

Before I answer the substitute,

I wanna introduce the solicitor named mister Tambo. Did I get it right?

You did get it wrong. Thank you.

Into direct and in company.

Good evening. Emily Friedman, director of Housing and Human Services.

Good evening. Alyssa McDermott, director of Housing and Human Development Division.

Thank you. Thank you both for being here. And what you are doing today is giving us an overview of this on this that we received on the meeting. Yes. Okay.

Alright. So thank you for

making that substitution. I'll let Alyssa set the stage for the the process to come from here and give you a brief overview of what you're looking at.

Alright. So, director Friedman and I are pleased to join you this evening to present our proposed HUD entitlement, grant on behalf of mayor Smiley. Tonight, we're gonna go over an overview of the process, the methodology on considerations from when we were crafting this budget, and then we're also gonna outline some next steps to advance the budget, to enable the release of funds from HUD. So this budget will serve serve as our second investment under the twenty twenty five to twenty twenty nine consolidated plan. The five year comp plan was informed by community engagement, a detailed market analysis market and needs analysis, and a review of the access and barriers to fair housing.

After establishing community needs, we were then charged with by HUD with responsibility to select the highest quality services meeting, those priority community needs at the best price. Following our consistent cycle, we released a NOFA, or a Notice of Funding Availability, in February, where we received almost 100 worthwhile proposals. Of course, incredibly difficult decisions had to be made due to the tremendous level of ask and the limited availability of our funding. We received in total $17,500,000 in requests, with 12,500,000 in CDBG requests alone. Our job this year and our outlook for local non profits is particularly challenging right now as we navigate federal funding landscapes that continue to consistently change.

And with that in mind, the mayor and staff identified, for funding those services and activities which ensure basic urgent needs like food and childcare, homelessness prevention and response, and refugee services are able to sustain their operations and baseline service delivery. Facility and housing proposals recommended are those that address critical operational barriers or concerns such as fire safety systems or ADA improvements. And we are also hoping to generate new units that serve our lowest income. Our emphasis still continues to be placed on clearly defined projects that are ready to proceed. To be funded, there must be a direct line between CDBG investment and eligible clients that are being served.

Direct service provision to low to moderate income clients and spaces improved must serve low to moderate income clients. So for example, we are not able to fund general nonprofit capacity building, no administrative offices, no maintenance, and things like that. And every activity must clearly meet a national objective and be eligible under HUD regulations. So next, we'll kind of just detail our outreach process. So we sent a digital notice via our listserv that included the due dates, the link to register for our webinar, and the link to the NOFA as well.

On this listserv, there are about 1,400 emails, and that includes lots of local nonprofits and all as well as all the council email accounts as well. We did post on the city's website community relations, and we put information available in the mayor's newsletters as well. We also put an ad in the Providence Journal letting everyone know that the NOFA was available. We did did hold an application workshop to allow individuals to ask some questions and get answers. That was done in early February.

It was recorded and posted online on the city's website, and we do have more than 80 registrants. The city has a well established web based application system for its competitive pools of CDBG funding, which will send automatic reminders and email reminders to complete draft and submit. Prior to rating our applications, HUD requires that we identify a minimum scoring threshold that applicants must meet before conducting further comparative analysis. Risk analysis of all potential subgrantees is also required by HUD. So some next steps.

HUD actually just announced our federal fiscal year '26 CDBG, HOME, ESG, and HOPA allocations for this year. So this enables us to develop the sub a budget that you've seen before you, excuse me, that reflects the actual allocations rather than having to use projections and include contingency provisions. The shared goal of this committee process is to work collaboratively to get a budget into our final form, pass the budget twice, and then the budget will be incorporated into a final final larger annual action plan to be put out for a federally prescribed thirty day public comment period and then submitted to HUD for approval. The need to endeavor to have these steps completed and HUD approvals in place by July 1 to avoid any disruptions in service or funding delays. So when looking at the budget, we can see that we have an allocation and a new cash balance.

Those are either from projects that either failed to move forward or any projects that had come in under budget, program income that we received from our various equipment repair rules, and any loose change couch change in the cushions. This adds to our funds so that we can program it to activities, but it does not increase any of the caps that are prescribed by FUD. There are some fixed expenses, such as the applicable percent of admin and delivery costs, which is set by OMB as allowable to administer, monitor, oversee, and deliver program in compliance with the HUD federal regulations. There is a public service cap. The percentage grantees can expend on public service is capped by HUD regulations.

And both the community centers and public services will fall under this cap. And the sum of the first two buckets is about just over $1,000,000. There's an economic development section, which is a lot of technical assistance programs and investments to serve low to moderate micro businesses or small businesses with a goal of job creation and retention. We also provide lending to businesses through the revolving loan fund at Providence Business Loan Fund. There is no cap on the economic development category.

And then we also have some public facilities. These are nonprofit or city owned facilities that are open and available to the public. They must serve low to moderate income clientele or be open to an LMA neighborhood. These are things such as libraries, playgrounds, shelters, community centers, facilities serving the disabled, and rep centers as well, and there is no cap on that category either. And then next, we have our board allocations, which are funds made available to identify eligible brick and mortar projects within each board.

Prior to passage out of this committee, we will need to identify any of the all the board projects. And I know Kyle Delgado and Robert Baptista have been working and been in touch with many of you to identify these projects. And we can also offer any suggestions as well if anyone is looking for any. And then looking at the budget, there are other funds. We do have home funds in the amount of 1,300,000 for the development of affordable rental and home ownership housing.

And we are requesting home funds in the amount of $548,000 for a new down payment assistance program, which our department has done in the past successfully. And then we do have our, emergency solutions grant funds in the amount of 459,000. This is for shelter operations, rapid rehousing, and essential services. Our ESG funds are deployed through the Consolidated Homeless Fund Consortium. This enables a one stop application process, and it allows us to meet the 100% non federal match requirements and foster a continuum of shelter services.

And then we have our HOPCO funding, our housing opportunities for persons with AIDS in the amount of $1,500,000 for supportive services, tenant based rental assistance, and project based housing for persons living with HIV and AIDS in the Providence MSA. This MSA area does include Bristol County. Our investment focus remains on direct housing provisions. So we continue to work collaboratively with counsel to boost the program impact and efficiency, such as prioritizing transformable place based projects that improve the quality of life or service impact in underserved areas. And we also must keep in mind any parallel funding opportunities, such as city budget grants, opioid settlement funds, and etcetera, crafting our investment strategy to maximize leverage, allocate resources efficiently, and ensure key priorities are met.

So our goal, again, is to work together to ensure that we have a complete budget with eligible activities, ready to proceed projects, incorporate it into our action plan for HUD approval, and pass this out by the fiveeight docket deadline for May and June council passages to meet our submission deadlines.

I'll answer your questions, but I'll I'll just when we use projected budgets, why do we use?

So historically, we have, unfortunately, the federal government has not had great success in passing the timely budget. As you know, we end up in continuing resolutions. We end up in government shutdowns, and that has been par for the course for the last few years. And so what we have developed was a projected a historically projected budget with a contingency of a pro rata provision so that we could then adjust the budget later when the actuals actually came in from the federal government. This year, we're pleased that for the first time in a long time, we actually got it at the ideal time, which is, you know, before we commence the committee process.

So we were able to adjust and shift to actuals. We, unfortunately, did not unexpected, experienced a small cut from last year. We knew that was likely to happen. Our projected budget had been based on a slightly deeper cut, so it feels like good news. It's not actually good news, but it feels like good good news because we were being too conservative.

So our actual allocation, though we're expecting about 5,000,000, it's actually 5.2. So it gave us a little bit of money that we were able to, right size the administrative recalculate our administrative caps. We were able to, in some places, add projects where there were some limited capacity to do so. So the only we were able to have one single project in speaking with council staff. It was flagged that announced the Tucker River Watershed, the Moreno Park And Greenway Facility projects.

There was a interest in seeing that funded and potential willingness to collaborate and fuel funds to boost the impact there. So that was effectively the project that we identified that would make sense to us. Thank

you. Is there a new one if you would

like to talk to here? Maybe she walks through just a general strategy, which was in terms of community centers, we look to try to sustain funding. So those are at or close to level. Under public services, as Alyssa mentioned, we really were looking to expand or backstop those agencies that are really being destabilized by federal actions right now because we know that these are working with our most vulnerable frontline populations. So you'll see some level or increased funding for things like health clinics for the uninsured, services for refugees and immigrants, basic cultural culturally appropriate food because we experienced serious snap disruption during the last government shutdown.

And so in terms of public services, what you're really seeing here are an effort to sustain those really sort of frontline organizations that are facing very uncertain budgets in the coming coming years.

Any questions?

Okay. Alright. Let's see here. Vice chairman.

Question. Obviously, there was an adjustment and then additional money. Mhmm. Were there any other organizations besides the that was added or could have been added?

Unfortunately, no. We were really not able to have a meaningful amount to, add any additional, the other higher scoring applications in public facilities. For example, you know, we would have been doing partial funding. And when asked the topic, it seemed to be the only one that really had had a coherent plan to be able to fund it at a reduced level that match with council dollars and other other great funding that's available

to that project. But were there any other any other top three that that were lingering out there just in case we got more money that they could've been added?

We looked at so the community libraries, for example, housing authority, all of those were very well scoring applications. Unfortunately, most of those asks in our public facility category was quite large. And so the amount that we had to distribute was really not sufficient to add more than one organization.

Thank

you very much. So province province housing authority, they belong to us, to the city of province? They don't get the little money?

They they do. They are a quasi public agency. They do receive a capital fund as well as the leasing dollars, obviously, for section eight and project based vouchers. I think it's well known that public housing is direly underfunded. Their capital budget is not adequate to cover the basic maintenance needs of public housing, let alone when they apply to us.

It's usually for amenities or improvements that are not sort of basic capital of repairs. They're looking at really sort of increasing quality of life for residents. So these are things like split splash pads and playgrounds. On this or water replacement.

That's $200,000.

Yes. This is one that is a critical repair need that they it's not currently budgeted in their capital plan.

Because this this like, it's not for a playground. It's not for to invest in facility for the kids or the people. This is maintenance issue. Are we allowed to give noise to maintenance, like, to replace boilers? And So boilers, a