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Faced with Funding Shortfall, Williamstown CPC Pauses Deliberations
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
05:02AM / Saturday, January 30, 2021
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Community Preservation Committee on Wednesday decided to hold off until spring before deciding how much grant funding to recommend to June's annual town meeting.
 
The committee held its first meeting of the current funding cycle and quickly agreed by unanimous votes that all four of the applications before it are appropriate under the Community Preservation Act.
 
The problem is that the total funding requested exceeds the amount of money expected to be available in fiscal 2022 by $26,518. And the committee would like to carry some of its current balance into FY22 as a cushion in case next year's revenues underperform.
 
"It's my recommendation we reduce some of these applications and go into next fiscal year with at least $25,000 in our account," Chair Phil McKnight said. "That means a savings of $50,000, in round numbers, in the applications before us."
 
Much of the committee's discussion Wednesday centered on how to find those savings.
 
Three of the applications came to the committee with dollar amounts specified to fit specific project needs.
 
The Williamstown Historical Museum is asking for $50,000 in CPA funds to fill a funding gap in a $301,600 project fueled mostly by private donations. Habitat for Humanity seeks $80,000 to pay for two years of construction management services for a single-family home on Maple Street. The Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation needs $56,000 as a local match to offset $327,450 in state funds for an Agricultural Preservation Restriction on 18 acres of prime farmland.
 
The outlier is the town's Affordable Housing Trust, which is seeking unrestricted funds that are not tied to a specific budget line item.
 
By law, municipal housing trusts are the only entities that can be funded in such a manner under the CPA. The trusts are created with the intention that they have the flexibility to fund specific projects without waiting for annual dispersals through town meeting.
 
The trust's $160,000 request is the largest before the committee and represents 46 percent of the funding sought. The money is intended to continue the emergency rental assistance program the trust created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, launch a corresponding emergency mortgage assistance program and support other Trust initiatives.
 
The funds already expended in the Wiliamstown Emergency Rental Assistance Program have been replaced by the town's proceeds from the federal CARES Act. And Town Manager Jason Hoch, a voting member of the committee, said Wednesday that he is confident there will be enough CARES Act funding to continue to do so through Dec. 31, 2021.
 
The problem is that Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act funding expires at the end of the calendar year, and the town's fiscal year runs from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022; in other words, the housing trust will have to survive on whatever funds it gets from this year's town meeting for six months after the federal funds sunset.
 
"The trust has known about CARES Act reimbursement for months," the trust's Chair Tom Sheldon told the committee. "It's been a rich dialogue with the town manager. We've not only known about it, we've built that into our calculations about the request we made. Our original request was actually $15,000 more than what you had before you. Based on the preliminary conversation [in December with CPC members], we voluntarily reduced that from $175,000 to $160,000.
 
"My worry is what [Hoch] has mentioned a couple of times, January 2022 to June 2022, when those CARES Act moneys are not going to be available, when other current moratoria [on evictions and foreclosures] are no longer in place. That may seem like a long way out, but we only have one shot at funds for that fiscal year."
 
In addition, while the emergency mortgage and rental assistance can be replaced by CARES Act funds, the AHT's longest running program, the DeMayo Mortgage Assistance Program for first-time homebuyers, is not CARES Act-eligible.
 
The Affordable Housing Trust also has been a partner with Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity. In 2015, the trust purchased vacant housing lots on Summer Street and at the corner of Cole Avenue and Maple Street with the intention of developing homes that would be deed-restricted to stay affordable.
 
That led to the Habitat project well underway with frontage on Cole Avenue and plans to build a second home next door with a Maple Street address.
 
Habitat President Elisabeth Goodman presented the non-profit's request to the committee.
 
"I've been listening to the [committee] talking about what the applicants are prepared to do on their own for funding," Goodman said. "I will say we spend every board meeting talking about fundraising. We ask for individual donations. We are constantly applying for grants. … But of course funding sources have been reduced in the COVID era.
 
"Also, some of the plan we had was to build [the Cole Avenue] house, sell it to the applicants with the bank, get funding from the bank mortgage and roll it into the next house. But as the construction is delayed because of COVID and the purchase is delayed because of COVID, we're not getting that rollover in funding. And all our construction costs and annual office costs and everything else, if you don't roll it over quickly, you have longer costs, more costs."
 
Thus the request for CPA funds to sustain Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity's operations because, Goodman said, the non-profit's building project manager, Paul Austin, is retiring and will not be available to give the volunteer labor he has provided in the past.
 
The $80,000 request from Habitat is budgeted to be spent over two years, $40,000 per year, for a construction supervisor/manager.
 
Committee members talked about asking Habitat for Humanity to take a $40,000 grant in CPA funds in FY21 and make a second request for funding in the FY22 funding cycle in order to get closer to the $50,000 in savings the committee seeks.
 
"If your proposal is to keep $40,000 [in the application] and ask us to come back next year and reapply, we'll do it," Goodman said.
 
At one point, member Joe Finnegan pointed out that the committee decided a couple of years ago to avoid "negotiating" with applicants by asking them to submit applications with a bottom line number for what an organization needs and accept an up-or-down vote on funding.
 
"We adopted that policy because it seemed to us unfair to make requests to cut 25 percent or 50 percent of the applicant's initial request because they came into this with good faith with the number they provided," McKnight. "We were reluctant to do that in subsequent years. But, here, we're facing a situation in which we cannot approve the full amount of all requests because we cannot be in a deficit situation."
 
McKnight signaled to the committee that he would welcome motions to decide on funding recommendations Wednesday night, but as the meeting went on, several members said they were not comfortable making a final decision at the first meeting.
 
And although it usually makes its decisions on recommendations in February, the panel decided to hold off and reconsider the question at a March 24 meeting for three reasons: the difficulties posed by the gap between total funds requested and available funds; the fact that town meeting itself is planned to be held in June instead of May due to the pandemic; and the possibility that the group will have more complete information in the spring.
 
Hoch said it is possible that the town and Affordable Housing Trust will have more of a sense of the demand for emergency rental and mortgage assistance, particularly once the latter "goes live" this winter. And there might be more information about the impact of COVID-19 on the economy.
 
"I suggest a pause of a couple of months because there's that uncertainty at this point," Hoch said. "I think two or three months of [factors] completely outside of anything we do here — getting a sense of what is the real vaccine trajectory, what is a more informed sense of what the economic recovery looks like and how much hangover into 2022 are we going to have."
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