Members of the Cheyenne City Council heard the results of the city's audit during a work session Friday afternoon. The city received a "clean audit." Alyte Katilius/Wyoming Tribune Eagle
Members of the Cheyenne City Council heard the results of the city's audit during a work session Friday afternoon. The city received a "clean audit." Alyte Katilius/Wyoming Tribune Eagle
CHEYENNE — After weeks of discussion, the Cheyenne City Council has decided not to end its community development block grant “entitlement” status.
City officials voted Monday night not to decline specifically earmarked federal funding that often funnels through the city to local nonprofits, but which also requires long staff hours to manage and often comes with strings attached. The proposed resolution would have phased out the CDBG grant program between the city of Cheyenne and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after 2023; instead, the city will continue as it has for another five-year cycle.
“I would like to urge my concerns for declining entitlement status, but first, before I get into that, I understand the city’s concerns and reasons behind it, the risks involved and budgeting issues,” Dan Dorsch, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Laramie County, said before the vote.
According to HUD, the CDBG program provides “annual grants on a formula basis to states, cities, and counties to develop viable urban communities by providing decent housing and a suitable living environment, and by expanding economic opportunities, principally for low- and moderate-income persons.”
Access to affordable housing is a concern in Cheyenne, Dorsch said, and although difficult to administer, the CDBG funding is one of the few “tools in the tool belt” the city has in addressing that gap.
“There is nothing on a local or state level that would replace the CDBG entitlement status of Cheyenne,” Dorsch said.
As a recipient of CDBG funds, Dorsch said that the grant requirements are onerous and “a pain.” However, he said 40 contractors have signed up in the last year to participate, helping Habitat build homes with the funding. He asked city officials take “more time to think through what we would be losing as a community if we were not entitlement status.”
Other representatives from Cheyenne nonprofits, including My Front Door and the Laramie County Senior Center, have spoken in favor of keeping the city’s entitlement status. At a Jan. 9 meeting, the city’s grants manager, Renee Smith, said the current balance of available CDBG grant funds for the city of Cheyenne is $861,156.16, even though the city receives about $400,000 per year in funding. That funding was to be spent over a five-year period, and perhaps because of the requirements related to spending the money, nonprofits were “not applying,” she said.
Councilor Michelle Aldrich said that she works with federal dollars every day in her day job, and, while difficult, she said they are necessary.
“I know that there has been talk that we could walk away from this and then notify HUD if we wanted to come back, and we would be able to come back in and resume our relationship with HUD,” Aldrich said. “I don’t know that it is that simplistic. I don’t know that we are at the point where we need to throw our hands up and walk away.”
To decline the funding would put Cheyenne’s nonprofits into a situation where they would be competing against all other Wyoming agencies for funding allocated to a statewide pool, she continued.
“We might or might not have any of our nonprofits awarded those funds,” she said.
Voting against the resolution — so, in favor of continuing to receive the federal funds — were councilors Jeff White, Bryan Cook, Aldrich, Mark Rinne, Scott Roybal and Pete Laybourn.
According to a December memo from grants manager Smith to the council, the resolution was proposed following “careful consideration and evaluating multiple risk and compliance factors” following “challenges of effectively managing the program with decreasing allocations while adhering to the growing number of unreasonable federal requirements.”
The city of Casper declined its entitlement community status in 2018. Smith said Monday that the city of Cheyenne does need to find ways to fund its nonprofits, but that CDBG funds simply are not the best way to do so.
Rinne asked Smith if there could be a way to pass on oversight associated with the grant program to the applicants, and she said there is not. Laybourn said that he was concerned that not a single Cheyenne citizen had stepped forward to ask the city to decline its CDBG entitlement status.
“The public, and people who are in pretty tough situations — I think that is indicative of something we should consider,” Laybourn said. “No funding source has been identified … what means or mechanism do we have to (fund) these very worthy community groups, that truly do work very hard on our behalf? What funding mechanism will we find? Are we going to create one? I haven’t heard that either.”
Councilor Ken Esquibel said that if he was only voting with his heart, he would have voted against the resolution. But he pointed out that the hours required for staff to manage small grants does not outweigh the benefits that staff, with more time, could use to pursue larger funding sources.
“How much time do we want our grant writers to be spending on $1,000 grants? Or do we want them to use that time more efficiently to be spent on million-dollar grants?”
Carrie Haderlie is a freelance journalist who covers southeast Wyoming from her home near Saratoga. She has written for the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, Laramie Boomerang, Wyoming Business Report and several other publications for many years, including covering the Wyoming Legislature.
