Housing director resigns from planning department
Carcifero ran city’s Community Development Block Grant program
WOONSOCKET — A key city department struggling with staff shortages has lost yet another body.
Christopher Carcifero, whose responsibilities included running the Community Development Block Grant program, has tendered his resignation, effective today.
Although it wasn’t the focus of the remote gathering, word of Carcifero’s departure surfaced on Monday during a Zoom meeting of the City Council, called for the purpose of addressing issues of transparency in the preparation and disbursement of CDBG funds. Carcifero gave no reason for his exit in a letter of resignation, but Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt framed it as a “personnel issue” and referred questions about it to the law department.
Councilman James Cournoyer said Carcifero left to accept a position in private industry. His official title was deputy director of housing and community development.
“It is with deepest regret that I offer you this letter of resignation,” Carcifero’s letter to the council says. “During my five years and ten months, it has been an honor and privilege to work with all of you on moving the City forward.”
During the meeting, Deputy Finance Director Cindy Johnston indicated that she had assumed some of Carcifero’s chores, including oversight of the CDBG fund, which presently has about $1.8 million on hand.
Over the last several months, a shortage of manpower in City Hall has become a matter of concern for the city council. The topic has been brought up on several occasions, after Baldelli-Hunt questioned whether there is sufficient staff on hand to comply with the council’s directive for supplying the panel with monthly activity reports from various departments.
Carcifero’s departure brings the number of vacant positions in the planning department to at least five, and the department has been without a director since January. Two code enforcement positions are among those open, but Baldelli-Hunt says the city is moving closer to filling them.
His employment status was only brought up in passing during Monday’s meeting, as councilors called for greater accountability in the handling of CDBG budgets, which can be quite malleable under federal rules.
The rhetoric was rather alarming at times, as one member of the panel – Cournoyer – likened the CDBG to
an administrative “slush fund.” The issue, he said, is that funds aren’t always spent in the manner the council approves when it votes to adopt the CDBG budget.
The changes in allocations typically happen without notification to the council, so there’s no opportunity for input, councilors said.
“This is not a slush fund for the administration,” he said. “It’s not a slush fund that people can just go and spend and move stuff around and the council that sets the budget and appropriates funds is kind of left in the dark.”
Cournoyer said the lack of transparency is “the biggest issue I have...an area I think we have to address.”
But Johnston roundly dismissed Cournoyer’s suggestion, saying the funds are tracked internally and all changes to the CDBG budget, known as “plan amendments,” are permissible under guidelines promulgated by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, the source of the money.
“No one’s using it as a slush fund,” she said.
The council passed an ordinance about two years ago requiring the administration to submit a CDBG budget to the council for approval. Reached for comment after Monday’s remote meeting, Cournoyer said the legislation was an attempt to resurrect what had been common practice in the city for many years. The process also required a public hearing to air the budget, which was itemized in great detail before it was adopted by the council.
For at least two years prior to the passage of the ordinance, Cournoyer said, the council had simply stopped receiving CDBG budgets for approval. Last year, the administration resumed submitting the budgets, but it’s routine for the budgets to be altered later through HUD’s plan amendment process without notification to the council.
As Johnston described the process, the CDBG is a sort of revolving fund in which allocations are reassigned on a regular basis, with HUD’s approval.
It’s unclear whether the council intends to tweak the reporting requirements to gain more oversight over the CDBG budget, but Cournoyer suggested that the new ordinance would be sufficient if it were followed. He said the administration should be providing the council with fund balances on a monthly basis.
Typically, the city receives from HUD over $1 million a year in CDBG funds, which are used for everything from road reconstruction to purchasing fire apparatus. Some of the money is disbursed to nonprofits for social service initiatives. It’s also been used in the past for the benefit of business entities for such ventures as facade improvements.
Cournoyer wasn’t alone in calling for more control over the use of the funds. At a minimum, Council Vice President John Ward suggested that the council should be apprised of proposed plan amendments, particularly if they represent marked shifts from their original earmarks.
For example, Ward said, “I would hate to see something like money that’s left over on facade improvements all of a sudden being used for police patrols.”