[Alicia Hunt]: Good evening and welcome to the city of Medford's Community Development Block Grant public hearing for our annual report to HUD on our Community Development Block Grant. September 23rd, 2026. I am Alicia Hunt. I am the Director of Planning, Development and Sustainability. We're currently hiring for the CDBG manager position, so I will be giving the presentation this evening. And with me is one of our graduate interns, Natalie, who will be managing the Zoom and helping with any technical issues this evening. So the reason of this CASER, which is a Consolidated Annual Performance Evaluation Report, is to give a report for the previous program year. and in CDBG the previous years, July 1st, 2025 through June 30th, 2026. And this paper outlines the city's accomplishments and how we use that funding. And we always ask for input from low and moderate income residents, social service agencies, the public at large on the use of our funds, including housing and community development needs and development of proposed activities. So this evening is an opportunity. We're actually in the public hearing period for our caper. Comments are due to the city by Sunday and by 5 p.m. But you may always provide comments to us on our Community Development Block Grant Fund and how they're used. They will feed future plans. So this money is from the federal government, from HUD, to benefit low and moderate income people, people with income at or below 80% of the area median income. And again, this is a federal definition and not our city's. This is how the federal government states we must use this money. And these projects must show benefits that they benefit people that are at least 51% of the people they benefit are low and moderate income. people. So for reference, this is the current chart of funding. So if you say, do I qualify? So the bright blue, the low 80% income limits, this is the income limit. This area is not a national area. This is an area that is a greater Boston area. And so you'll see these numbers are quite high. For a single person, it's $96,000 a year. For a family of four, it's $137,000 a year, qualifies as low and moderate income for these programs. The map shows you in yellow the areas in Medford that are block groups where more than 51% of the people meet this definition. So a couple of things, as I mentioned, it's a July 1 to June 30th year. Every year we have a request for public service proposal and we can only use 15% of our funds for that. We open that in January or early February. We make the decisions in by the end of April, which is we publish them in an annual action plan for the next year and we put that out for public comment for 30 days starting in April. that in that we list our public services, we list the projects we're gonna be doing, our programs for the next year with CDBG funds. During that period of time, we always hold a meeting with the city council in April where the public services can present their programs that they're applying for for the coming year. And then we hold another legal public hearing in front of the city council in early May and we asked that the city council at that time authorizes the mayor to submit the annual action plan. The plan is submitted to HUD by May 15th, and then we have this report. We think of this as the end of our CDBG year. It's due by September 30th to HUD for last year. So this is the report for last year. So every five years, the city must also create a consolidated plan that is how we plan to use the funding for the next five years. We're currently in the second year of our most recent consolidated plan, which covers 2025 through 2029. I'll just go on. So this year, which ended June 30th, this is how much money we had available. We had $1,559,000, and we spent most of that on projects, but then we had $216,000 we spent on public services and $210,000 on planning and administration. You might say we had $1.5 million. Why did we only spend $1 million? That is because some of the projects sometimes take longer to ramp up than we expect them to. The money rolls over, and then we can spend it in the subsequent year. So you'll see that a lot of that $500,000 that we would have expected to spend last year actually got paid out in August and September this year in one of our big streets projects. So some of the things that we did do this previous year, we installed new bleachers at Tufts Park, but our other public facilities improvements, we really leaned into streets and sidewalks this year. So you can see the brand new sidewalks on Arlington Street and a significant section of this actually had no sidewalk at all. So it was very exciting to add sidewalks to Arlington Street. And then we did some intersection improvements at Main and Stern and Willard Avenue and Main Street. And at our intersection improvements, we're putting in ADA crossings, so the curb cuts and crosswalks. We also have other kinds of accomplishments in this past year. We did a lot of stuff with affordable housing. finally implemented a housing rehabilitation loan program. This is something that the city ran back in the 80s and 90s, and we've been looking to bring that back. It's been a little bit of a slow roll to get something this significant rolling, but we have one affordable housing or one housing rehab project underway. One is complete, and we are getting ready to do two more. This is a program that we anticipate we will be opening up again this year and running another round of home rehabs this year. The residents must be income eligible in order to qualify that. The Affordable Housing Trust Fund Board finalized a five-year action plan and guidelines. So that's a big way that we're looking to support affordable housing in Medford is through this Affordable Housing Trust. We've also updated our zoning code to create housing development opportunities by establishing mixed-use districts where we only had commercial districts. And we created additional affordable units through private partnerships with developers. We mentioned the public services. We can only spend 15% of our funding on the public services, but they are a really big deal. So the public services in Medford, you can see the icons, the logos for the ones that we funded this year. But really we work to provide resources for people who are at risk of homelessness, residents in crisis, and the physically and emotionally disabled population. We helped with emergency and transitional housing needs such as legal aid, food pantry and meals, referral and counseling services. We do provide for the elderly population primarily through transportation and the provision of some recreational programs and transportation to them. And then we help with school children through helping to fund afterschool childcare programs for people in need. In economic development, this is something that's been new in recent years that we're adding in economic development programs So we continued our vacant storefront grants program. That program specifically incentivizes businesses to occupy vacant commercial spaces. People are always complaining about the vacant spaces. This is what we're able to do to help incentivize filling them. We ran a second round of project pop-up. So that gives low and moderate income entrepreneurs a temporary opportunity to try out what it's like to have a storefront. And we hosted a community business builders program. It's an education program for low and moderate income entrepreneurs. We did also spend down the last of our coronavirus money. This was a separate fund of money that we received during the pandemic. And it had to be completely spent down by September 30th of this year. We're glad to say that we succeeded in doing that. And this year we actually used it just to pay out some of the housing planners time, mostly because most of this money had already been spent down and we needed to spend the last of it. So we have funded some work programs or some of our work and programs that we have funded. Oh, sorry. Let me pause for a minute. That is the work that we did this past year. And now I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of our upcoming programs and things that we're working on. So this coming year, we're looking to do several more housing rehab loans, our third round of that, hosting a housing resource fair. And that was actually last night. But as we mentioned, the program year goes until June 30th. So we are currently, three months into the second, the new program year. So we hosted our housing resource fair. We're working on a policy to help businesses impact or displace from redevelopment. We are looking to do another round of our vacant storefronts program. And we're doing something new that you'll be hearing more about in upcoming meetings and public meetings is that we have we're establishing a neighborhood revitalization strategy area to better serve the LMI community. This is a way to help how we spend economic development money. And we have to do some outreach and some education and get some input on this. So you will be seeing in the coming days, a press release and outreach on this neighborhood revitalization strategy. And consider this the teaser for that program. We also will be doing some additional construction and design projects, some additional sidewalk and street improvements. We have some park accessibility improvements that are being planned, and we are planning to do some playground design. This year, we're looking at Tufts Park Playground. So the Neighborhood Revitalization Strategy Area Study. So this is your announcement. We'll have some opportunities for people to share their thoughts. You can learn more about it. We want residents to help shape this plan. Our staff will be at Oktoberfest on October 3rd from noon to four. We'll be at the Harvester Energy Festival on Saturday, October 17th from noon to three. And we'll have staff at the Pumpkin and Lantern Float on Saturday, October 24th from six to eight p.m. at Wright's Pod. We hope to see you at all of these amazing events coming up in the the coming months, and we are definitely looking forward to hearing your thoughts and your input on this program. All right. So we are welcoming your comments and suggestions. We're open to hear what people have to say. What needs are there for low and moderate income residents? What programs should we be running that we're not running? What do people need to to be seeing in Medford? Where would you like us to be seeing? As you can see, we can do construction projects, we can do design projects, we can run programs for people. What should be our priorities? We always wanna hear from you on these. You can submit comments on this report. This report, you can download from our website, medfordma.org slash CDBG, or you can get a copy from us in room 308, Comments have to be in by September 27th at 5 p.m. That's on the report itself. But we welcome comments on CDBG in general at any time. You are always welcome to send us comments. And on the next slide is where you can send them. So the email address is the letters OCD at medford-ma.gov. Send us your comments at any point. there or you can send us comments on this report there. And then sign up for our newsletter to hear about upcoming CDBG meetings and events and all the other programs going on in our office and in the city. The URL for our newsletter sign up is there. And that is all that I have this evening. If we have any questions, we can take questions. If anybody has any comments, we can take comments. or I can just leave it there. Seeing that we don't have any questions, Natalie, if there are any questions come in. Okay, great, thank you. Then we will wrap up and people can email us or call us at any time to provide their feedback. So thank you everybody for coming. We appreciate your time and have a good evening.