County selects projects for CDBG application
EL CENTRO — After multiple hearings in the last few months, the county voted Tuesday to select the two projects it will submit for funding consideration under the Community Development Block Grant.
In its application, the county will submit a funding request totaling $6.3 million for the Niland Public Safety Facility and Seeley water system improvements.
For the Niland Public Safety Facility project, the county is requesting the maximum allowed request of $5 million under the general allocation. The project will encompass a fire station, a Sheriff’s office substation and a cooling center for residents without air conditioning to make use of during extreme heat in the summer.
The second project is water infrastructure improvements in Seeley for $1.3 million which will be made under the Colonias allocation.
Seeley County Water District Board President Patrick Harris told the board during the hearing, the district absorbed the cost of engineering and design of the project but requested the project be submitted as part of the application since the community is in dire need of replacing old pipes in the south portion of Seeley.
“The plan is to replace those because we don’t have enough fire flow in those areas for fire abatement,” He said.
The CDBG is a federal program, but since the Imperial County is in a non-entitlement community, it has to apply for those funds through the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
The challenge for securing funding for 2018 was the program’s guidelines. To be eligible to receive funding, jurisdictions must have spent more than 50 percent of the grants received in the previous year.
For 2017, the county received a total of $3.4 million, and a total of 10 activities were approved by the state to be included as part of the application from Imperial County.
Those include the Winterhaven Public Safety Facility, Subsistence payments, neighborhood cleanups, the telemedicine program from Clínicas de Salud del Pueblo, Imperial County Free Library, Poe Colonia sewer repairs, Palo Verde water system improvements, Winterhaven water treatment plan as well as supplemental program income activities like equipment for the Imperial County Fire Department.
Almost half of all the funds the county received this year were allocated to the Winterhaven Public Safety Facility, which is currently at its early stages and therefore the county has yet to spend the 50 percent required of the 2017 grant to be fully eligible for 2018.
However, Colio said during the first hearing on Sept. 12 that for this year there will be an exception, and jurisdictions that have yet to spend half of allocated monies will be able to submit a waiver to qualify for funding with the caveat that it would only be for a single construction-ready project. Both projects approved unanimously by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday are shovel-ready.
Although the application meets the waiver requirements, the fate of its requests rests with the California Department of Housing and Community Development who will ultimately decide whether or not to grant the waiver for the county to be eligible for the requested funds. The CDHCD will decide early next year.