Low-income repair program ends
Officials blame costly government regulations
LIMERICK » After two months of back-and-forth debate, bureaucracy won and residents of lowincome housing lost.
At their meeting Tuesday night, Limerick Supervisors reluctantly voted to discontinue the township’s long participation in a federally-funded program that helped make repair to low-income homes.
In June, Township Manager Dan Kerr outlined for the supervisors how federal bureaucracy surrounding a Community Development Block program Limerick has used for decades to help lowincome home rehabilitation was making the program unsustainable.
In July, the supervisors reluctantly decided to keep the program going for another year, despite the added costs.
At the Sept. 18 meeting, they reversed that decision as the deadline for applying for another round of funding approached.
Kerr said because the arc of the program is so slow, the township still has about $240,000 remaining in the account that can be used to help rehabilitate low-income homes until it runs out.
Even doing that will require the spending of between $20,000 to $30,000 of township funds.
Kerr has been warning the supervisors for months that the costs of complying with the everthickening layers of rules would consume all the money the program provided for administration and require the spending of money raised through local taxes.
He said in 2016, the township received $198,000 in CDBG block grant money, but had to spend $24,000 on administration, auditing the contractors, filling out reports and the like.
The money once allocated to Limerick — between $190,000 to $200,000 per year — will instead go to Montgomery County, although there is no saying how much of it will be put into the county’s similar low-income housing program.
In the future, Limerick properties can still apply for the program run by the county, but they will be competing against applicants from throughout the county.
Kerr explained that the rules have become so burdensome that, for example, where once the township could go in and use the program to replace a heater that failed in the middle of winter, the rules now require that the entire building be brought up to code.
There are many rules — prevailing wage, ensuring women- and minority-owned businesses are among the bidders, requirements that contractors hire low-income workers for the project — Kerr said.
In June, Kerr offered up the following example: “We had a job at a mobile home, I won’t say where, where we could have purchased a whole new mobile home for $15,000; just towed away the old one and plopped down a brand new one, for $15,000.”
However, Kerr said, the program’s rules don’t allow that, “so instead we had to spend $40,000 to bring that mobile home up to code.”
“We used to do 20 major repairs a year, but now we’re down to sixto-eight a year, depending on how much work needs to be done,” Kerr said in June.
“It’s a real shame,” said Supervisors Chairwoman Elaine DeWan. “We used to help a lot of people with this program.”
This article first appeared as a post in The Digital Notebook blog.