2021-03-02 HCHA Approved Minutes

Home

HCHA meeting March 2, 2021 Development to keep all those plates spinning until we can be pau and we can just focus on the program implementation and so I'm happy to answer any questions you folks have and also we really seek your support in terms of authorizing the County to enter into this grant agreement. Kierkiewicz: Thank you Mr. Le I appreciate the overview. Any questions here in Hilo? Ms. Lee Loy? Lee Loy: Thank you Chair. I'm not sure Douglas, if this is for Douglas or for Zendo, thank you for being here both of you, reading through the grant agreement there's an appendix as it relates to funding, it's Appendix A, and it's a table and it notes the 2019 disaster funds and it specifically calls out Hawaii County and has allocations 66 million, unmet needs 16 million total allocation 83 million but then there's this big six hundred, or five hundred eighty-three million, and I'm trying to understand cause I'm incredibly grateful for all the money that we are getting and I'm just trying to understand do we try and we have numbers who sit on our NECO committee who could lean into our federal partners on how, it's a big number. Le: This column on the right that you see in the table of the grant agreement, you know, where very briefly describes what is a complicated policy issue is the minimum that must be spent in what HUD calls the most impacted distressed area, right, and so often times, say, not in our situation, a jurisdiction, say, large state, right, will receive two billion dollars in CDBG Disaster Recovery funds, they prioritize how much of that total grant award must be spent in the most impacted and distressed area and that kind of prioritized those funds for that area, even if the provision of those grants funds were projects and services outside of the most impacted distressed area is where the balance of the funds are. In our situation, for the County of Hawai `i, the situation is flipped, right, and so between the two grants that came from the two congressional appropriations, our total allocation is less than what must be spent in the mid earn according to HUD, so I think advocacy and partnership with our congressional delegation is always really key, that actually has helped us get to where we are today, you know, there is a moment in time when even the amount or the scale of recovery funding was unclear but if I put on my math hat, the two congressional allocations towards these disasters in 2017 and 2018 have been spoken for within that large pie, right, that has been split among all of us as jurisdictions who experience disasters then. Even the additional 23 million dollars, what will be essentially a second supplemental amount that our congressional delegation was really critical in securing but also would be helpful is actually the result of splitting up the rest of the pie, right, and so after we receive the 83 million and everyone else receives theirs, there was some amount left essentially because between October 1 It of 2019 and December 311t of 2019 HUD held a couple hundred millions dollars just in case there were couple more Page 6 of 19