Statesboro City Council adopted an Urban Redevelopment Plan and named the mayor and council members themselves as an Urban Redevelopment Agency on Tuesday as the city prepares to seek federal grants and financing to upgrade blighted housing and parks.
The first neighborhood targeted for improvements is centered around Johnson Street, but areas around Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, the Whitesville community and Mulberry Street would be the focus of investment. Within the targeted areas, approximately 40% of single-family housing units are in need of "significant rehabilitation" or replacement, according to county tax evaluations cited in the city's plan.
“We have blight in our community, in our city, and what we would do is if we are successful in getting any of these grants, we would utilize those grants to improve the conditions in those neighborhoods, but even without getting those grants, it helps us with our efforts to clean up blight in those neighborhoods,” City Manager Charles Penny told the mayor and council Tuesday morning.
A second public information meeting on the plan was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 7, in the Jones-Love Cultural Center at Luetta Moore Park, 121 Martin Luther King Drive. Citizens can also attend the meeting virtually via Zoom through a link given below. The first such meeting was held Monday afternoon at City Hall, also with a Zoom connection.
The information meetings are meant to gather public input and “bring a sense of urgency to our community” about improving neighborhoods and housing, Penny said.
Size of challenge
Within Statesboro as a whole, about 3% of the homes are rated as “poor,” or dilapidated, by the Bulloch County Tax Assessor’s Office. Another 9% of the total are judged to be fair, meaning that they require “significant rehabilitation,” according to background information in the city’s new plan.
But in the Urban Redevelopment Plan areas, “conditions are significantly worse,” the summary asserts. Of the roughly 1,000 single-family homes in the targeted areas, 288, or almost 29%, are rated as “fair” and 110 homes, or roughly 11%, are rated as “poor.”
So overall, an estimated 40% of homes in these areas are identified as either "fair" or "poor" and thus in need of rehabilitation or replacement. Specific houses outside the core areas are also identified in the plan.
"It's very difficult when you live in substandard housing to tell somebody that we can't fix your house because you're not in the neighborhood, or the target area, so what we're also doing is we're looking at some scattered-site housing redevelopment," Penny said after Tuesday's council session.
CHIP and CDBG
City staff members intend to apply for two types of grants this year, a Community Housing Improvement Program, or CHIP, grant and a Community Development Block Grant, or CDBG, share. Both are mainly federal money administered at the state level through the Georgia Department of Community Affairs.
The CHIP grant application deadline is this month. The CDBG deadline comes later in the year.
A CHIP grant amount of $600,000 would be typical, Penny said. Statesboro's last CDBG award was for $750,000, but that was for infrastructure such as water and sewerage, and awards for housing rehabilitation are sometimes larger, said Assistant City Manager Jason Boyles.
"Without this plan, we could send all the information we wanted to, to DCA, and we really aren't going to get anywhere because they want to know that we have a plan for how we would use the funds," Penny said.
City Council members received a printout of the overall plan, plus a partial "revitalization area strategy" specific to the Johnson Street neighborhood, with area maps and photographs of dilapidated and abandoned homes.
The Johnson Street area is one of five Statesboro neighborhoods identified by the local Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, or GICH team, as needing redevelopment.
Kathy Field, the city's planning and development director, called the Urban Redevelopment Plan "the 5,000-foot vision," with the Johnson Street proposal being the first of five "action plans" for GICH neighborhoods.
"So we'll be in the neighborhood on Thursday morning to actually talk about the Johnson Street action plan," she said.
A brief public hearing was held during Tuesday's regular council meeting, but nobody from the public spoke for or against the plan. The council then the adopted it on a unanimous 4-0 vote. Mayor Pro Tem Paulette Chavers, the council member from District 2, presided at Tuesday's meeting, and so did not vote. Mayor Jonathan McCollar was not physically present but sat in on the meeting via Zoom.
In addition to home rehabilitation and acquisition of dilapidated properties, the Urban Redevelopment Plan includes cost projections for street and drainage improvements. It also incorporates the city's plans for improvements to Luetta Moore Park and Grady Street Park.
$28M long-term
The redevelopment plan shows projected costs of all the housing, infrastructure and park improvements totaling $28 million. It lists possible long-term funding sources including $10 million in CDBG awards from 2021 through 2031 and four possible CHIP grants totaling $1.6 million.
Other possible sources include $5 million in city funds for infrastructure improvements and $2.4 million in city administrative expenses, $5 million from sale of property acquired for redevelopment and $4 million in bond financing for the park projects.
Now an agency
Penny and the city's contracted financial advisors had suggested the creation of Urban Redevelopment Agency as a tool for financing the Luetta Moore and Grady Street park improvements. City Council also unanimously adopted a resolution Tuesday that created the agency and named the mayor and the council members as the agency board.
"The Urban Redevelopment Agency is able to exercise all powers set up now under Georgia urban redevelopment law," said City Attorney Cain Smith. "They essentially have all powers related to redevelopment except for the exercise of eminent domain, which is of course reserved for mayor and council, both under state law and under our charter."
He was not suggesting that the council will necessarily use eminent domain, the power to force the sale of private property for public purposes. But the elected officials together already have that authority.
Tuesday's vote lets them, as a redevelopment board, contract services and incur debt for the projects, Smith explained. Any newly elected mayor or council member would automatically succeed the previous official on the redevelopment board.
The Zoom link for Thursday's 8:30 a.m. meeting is https://zoom.us/j/97040589441?pwd=V0JGTHFvbzhPZUo5YmZhL0xnVkRyZz09