Cross_cutting

58:32 Perhaps there's an opportunity here. Any other comments? - We can look into that, thank you. I will talk with Joy Fowler about the overall context of these other commissions as well. Thank you.

58:54 - Oh sorry, Deputy City Manager Lisa Brandl, apologies. - City Attorney. - Thank you Mayor Nina Cook, City Attorney. I'll work with the City Manager's Office. I understand they are preparing, maybe Deputy City Manager Brandl has more information, a list of priorities for council to consider in terms of resources and staff time. So I'll defer my role, if that's okay with council, to the City Manager's Office to coordinate with Joy Fowler and priorities, if that is acceptable to council. - Yes, thank you very much. All right, that concludes our consent agenda and it brings us into the public hearing. This is a resolution relating to the adoption of the city's Community Development Block Grant, CDBG and Home Investment Partnerships,

59:53 Annual Action Plan for the 2026 program year authorizing the City Manager to execute agreements on behalf of the City of Vancouver, consistent with the CDBG and Home Annual Action Plan providing for severability and effective date. And we have staff, good evening. - Good evening, Samantha Whitley, Housing Programs Manager and I'm joined here tonight with Tasha Slater, Housing Coordinator and Victor Saldana who is our Small Business Program Manager and I believe we have a presentation to share. Thanks, Sarah. So we will talk about tonight our timeline. Oh, where's my slide? Timeline, how the community has participated with the development of the plan, the resources and funding we have available from HUD and how we expect to award it

1:00:49 and what those funding resources will, what outcomes they'll have in the community and then at the end we have a substantial amendment to our 2025 plan that we would also like approval on before we submit all of this to HUD. So our annual timeline, we start every year with a notice of funding availability in October and this is a long lead up to when we actually get the funding which is July 1st. So even though it looks like a short timeline on the slide, you have three months where we have the funding availability we are helping applicants understand the funding and what all of the federal requirements are. We're looking at pre-applications before any applicants spend a lot of time on a full application so we review the pre-applications in November and then we provide feedback to the non-profits and the community partners that are proposing funds,

1:01:47 proposing to receive funds because we wanna make sure that what they're proposing is gonna be eligible and it's gonna meet all of the HUD and federal requirements. So after the pre-applications are reviewed and approved to move forward, they submit a full application which is pretty extensive. I think we have between 15 and 20 questions about their program, their capacity, their other funding sources and so we review these full applications as staff and then we provide feedback on the full application to the applicants because we wanna make sure that they have the strongest application possible before they are reviewed by our committees. So between January and March, we're reviewing these with our committees. We have a specialized housing and social service committee that is made up of people who have a lot of experience in that realm and then Victor's team is made up, we have a business assistance review committee that's specialized in that kind of work,

1:02:46 finance and small business assistance. So we are doing presentations with all the committees. We're doing risk assessments on other applications. We're looking at each agency's capacity, staff turnover, legal issues, their ability to actually meet all these federal requirements and carry out the activity throughout the year. So that is, even though it's represented by two little slides, two little dots up there, it's six months of work to look at these applications and bring them forward into our action plan that we draft and I'll say this, I'm saying as we, this is Tasha, drafted the whole action plan. It's an extensive HUD template document that we shared out. We have to share it for at least 30 days for public comment. So that's been underway this past month and then we bring it forward to you for approval. We have to submit it to HUD by May 15th

1:03:45 because they have 45 days to review it. They'll give us feedback and sometimes ask for adjustments and then that takes that full time before the July 1st program year begins which is not to say that we always get our funds from HUD then but some of our programs can begin based on funding that we have on hand and then it's, yeah, and then the full cycle starts again. So with, I mentioned that we shared out this action plan for public review. We have a extensive email list. We also work with communications. They help us with social media and the press release. It was advertised in the paper. We want as many people as possible to review this plan and give us any feedback. We don't usually get a lot of feedback but we offer infographics and trying to make it easier for people to understand what we're proposing and what we're funding.

1:04:43 So that's part of what we're required to do with HUD and part of what we're happy to do to get people's input. - We'll turn it over to Tasha, thanks. - Okay, Tasha Slater, Senior Housing Planner. In 2026, we have three major funding sources with CDBG which is our Community Development Block Grant. We have an estimated award from HUD for about 1.3 million and then another 350,000 from prior year resources for a total of about 1.7 million. For home funding, we were awarded a little less than 700,000. We are expected to receive about 50,000 in program income

1:05:38 and about 250,000 in prior year resources along with about 213,000 in set asides for community housing development organizations which I'll talk about in a little bit. So that's about 1.2 million for home funds. And then for our home ARP funding, we were awarded about 2.1 million in 2021. Those funds we were given and they must be spent out by September, 2030. And we are spending about five, we will be spending 500,000 of those funds. So the agency is awarded.