Lewis County Towns Working to Change ‘Too Affluent’ Status to Become Eligible for Grants

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In August 2014, several small towns in Lewis County learned they were apparently too affluent to qualify for a federal grant program. 

Some of those communities are in the process of conducting new income surveys in the hopes of showing the federal government agency holding the purse strings their citizens’ income is low enough to qualify for the grants.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development used data from the American Community Survey to determine Morton, Pe Ell, Toledo and Vader were too affluent for the Community Development Block Grant program, which is designed to help communities with low-income residents.

 

The towns of Morton and Pe Ell are both having income surveys conducted in an effort to show their communities do qualify for the program.

Each town must have a certain percentage of residents respond, and a particular percentage of the respondents must show they are below a certain income threshold to help the communities qualify for the program.

Mayor Lonnie Willey in Pe Ell said he’s pretty certain the income survey the town is doing will show the community does qualify for the grants, and hopes enough people respond.

“This is really going to help our community,” he said.

Willey said the survey administrators that determined Pe Ell was too affluent to qualify should have been thorough.

“It’s just frustrating that when they came through, they didn’t do a complete survey … it’s not fair to the rest of the community,” Willey said.

The town currently has CDBG funds it will use for its overhaul of Second Street.

Morton Mayor Dan Mortensen said he expects to have the results of the town’s new survey in April. 

However, he said he doesn’t know if the new survey will change the town’s status.

He would like to be eligible for the funding, but also hopes the residents’ incomes are too high to qualify. 

“It’s kind of a double edge sword,” he said, but he knows that the inability to apply for the grant funding has created a hardship for small communities. 

Toledo also plans to conduct a new survey and do outreach to educate citizens about the importance of responding to the survey.

The city received more than $1 million in CDBG funding for its new wastewater treatment plant and $725,000 for its water tower.

Toledo already had its applications in for CDBG funding for the two projects when the information about the change in status was released.



City Clerk Michelle Whitten said because Toledo already had its applications in when the determination was made, neither of those projects were affected and funding was awarded. 

“In a smaller community like Toledo these types of funding agencies are important to keep costs down,” Whitten said.

 

The Vader City Council learned last week that an attempt to amend the town’s status wasn’t successful due to a lack of participation in a survey.

Lewis County, which operates the Vader-Enchanted Valley water system, had a survey conducted for that service area, and got a large enough response to make the survey valid. 

The survey found the service area qualified for the grant program.

Cathi Read, with the Washington State Department of Commerce, which administers the CDBG program in the state, said officials looked at the survey data for just the city in the service area to see if Vader alone would be eligible, but not enough residents responded in the survey.   

The Department of Ecology also uses the American Community Survey when considering whether to offer a town a grant or low interest loan for a project.

Vader is hoping to upgrade its wastewater system, and a grant or low interest loan would help to afford the project.

If the city decides to move forward with another survey,  the town should do more preparation and educate residents about the survey and what it could do, said Scott Pollock, who conducted the survey for the water system service area.

 

Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, has been working to resolve the grant ineligibility issue. In April 2015 she sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting the agency find alternative data sources.

As a result of the letter, the office is conducting a study, the congresswoman’s communications director Amy Pennington wrote in an email.

She said the GAO will be sending a draft of the report to HUD and the U.S. Census Bureau for comments later this month.  

According to the letter from Herrera Beutler and Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., the survey can generate inaccurate results.

The Congress members requested the GAO look at how HUD protects communities that could be adversely affected by inaccurate data, what alternative data sources could communities who disagree with the survey results use and what is the worth of data submitted by communities.