City staff faltered on spending CDBG funds
The City of Hollister’s inability to exhaust long-held federal
grant dollars
– and get back in the application game with the rest of the
country – reflects poor staff management and weak leadership by a
council that too often fails to hold officials accountable.
Since the early 2000s, city officials have known about the
remaining $722,000 in federal grant dollars that they must spend
before gaining back eligibility to apply for Community Development
Block Grant funds, a major source for neighborhood and economic
rehabilitation in communities nationwide.
City staff faltered on spending CDBG funds
The City of Hollister’s inability to exhaust long-held federal grant dollars – and get back in the application game with the rest of the country – reflects poor staff management and weak leadership by a council that too often fails to hold officials accountable.
Since the early 2000s, city officials have known about the remaining $722,000 in federal grant dollars that they must spend before gaining back eligibility to apply for Community Development Block Grant funds, a major source for neighborhood and economic rehabilitation in communities nationwide.
The city has sat on the money for years and top officials have shown almost no interest in spending it on projects deemed eligible by the CDBG guidelines, which allow for a wide breadth of uses so long as a municipality can document the desired impacts of the federal government. In general, the CDBG rules focus on stressing improvements affecting lower-income residents or business growth and retention.
Those guidelines leave room for interpretation and allow for broadly defined uses. There is much less room for interpretation, however, when it comes to the fact that the city must spend the funds on CDBG-related activities. CDBG representatives have been very clear from the start that the money must be funneled back into eligible uses, how Hollister cannot turn around and declare the funds as wholly discretionary, which they like to do whenever humanly or otherwise possible.
The city’s top brass instead has insisted on pushing this idea, steered by a private consultant, that no restrictions should confine them, that they can do with the federal grant dough what they did a couple of years back with more than $1 million in revenue from the sale of the future courthouse property – change the rules to work in their favor, label the money as “miscellaneous,” and temporarily appease the growing anxiety of a workforce faced with dwindling cash.
But the irony of Hollister’s stubbornness this time is that by holding the money for so long, the plan has backfired. They have missed opportunity after opportunity to obtain annual grants routinely awarded to local communities in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have wasted chance after chance for communitywide advancement.
Where is the leadership? From a city hall management perspective, this whole CDBG mess reflects altogether lousy staff work. From a council perspective, the elected members must start getting tougher with the staff. They absolutely have to begin holding top staff members, particularly city management, accountable for such neglect of local taxpayer dollars in a trickle-down system that relies on participation and effort from local municipalities.
If change is upon us, there is no other place to start than the top in a culture so poisoned by the drive for fiscal discretion, no matter the consequences.
