Jon Cravens, left, a Toledo public works assistant, gives a tour of the town's wastewater treatment plant to local politicians, including U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, fourth from the right, in May 2016. The plant was built in part with Community Development Block Grant funds, prior to the federal government ruling the town is now "too affluent" for such a grant.
In the federal spending bill passed in April to avoid a government shutdown, Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, secured $1 million to reimburse communities wrongly determined to be too affluent to receive Community Development Block Grants because of an error in census data.
Cities impacted by the issue in Lewis County include Toledo, Pe Ell and Vader. These cities can now be reimbursed if they must pay to conduct studies to prove the information relied on by the federal government was incorrect.
“These communities should absolutely qualify for these funds to provide clean drinking water and passable roads, and it borders on shameful that I’ve had to push so hard to get the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to admit — let alone fix — its mistakes,” Herrera Beutler said in a statement to The Chronicle. “It’s hard to find a better example of D.C. bureaucrat resistance to common sense than HUD rejecting towns like Pe Ell, Vader and Toledo for critical development grants because they are ‘too affluent.’”
Without block grants, small communities, often with low median incomes, can’t improve their infrastructure or repair their utilities systems or their roads and sidewalks, Toledo City Clerk Michelle Whitten said.
“In a community our size it is very difficult to fund infrastructure improvements and put it on the back of our ratepayers,” she said.
It is unknown how many communities are impacted by this in the country, according to Herrera Beutler’s office.
In order for these communities to prove they are not too affluent to qualify for block grants, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires them to conduct their own income survey, which can cost thousands of dollars depending on the firm the city hires.
The city of Toledo is planning on conducting a survey this summer, and the city of Pe Ell recently conducted one of its own.
Toledo City Clerk Michelle Whitten said she is looking into how much the survey will cost but is unsure of a range at this time.
Under the federal spending bill, cities still have to pay to conduct the survey, but they can then apply for reimbursement. Whitten said this will make it easier for the city to conduct the survey.
Also included in the bill is a requirement for HUD to publish the margin of error it used in determining the eligibility of communities to receive grants if the margin is 20 percent or greater, according to information from Herrera Beutler’s office.
This will help determine how many communities are impacted by the error. Historically, HUD has not published that information.
