Centre County commissioners allocate $282K for Community Development Block Grant projects
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Centre County awarded over $280,000 in CDBG funds to two water authority projects.
- Milesburg Borough received no grants but may qualify for alternative funding.
- Federal CDBG program faces possible cuts, although bipartisan Senate support may help.
The Centre County Commissioners awarded Community Development Block Grants to projects for two Penns Valley area water authorities Tuesday.
The Haines-Aaronsburg Water Authority’s $202,808 grant request for a water main replacement on West Plum and West Aaron streets and the Haines-Woodward Water Authority’s $79,418 grant request for a water line replacement along Mountain Avenue were selected out of four applications that were reviewed.
Originally, HAWA was going to request around $422,920 in grant funding, but according to Leslie Hosterman, the Susquehanna Economic Development Association Council of Government’s (SEDA-COG) Community Development Project Coordinator, that number had been scaled back by more than half after an updated engineering opinion.
The two projects take up $282,226 of the county’s $343,476 allotted funds, with just over $61,000 remaining.
Milesburg Borough had also requested $61,000 in funding through the grant program for two small but separate street reconstruction and paving projects, but no grants were awarded to either.
“The [county’s] planning department was actually in the [Milesburg] Borough yesterday, and they had talked about liquid fuels or ‘fee for local use’ money perhaps being better resources for funding those projects, and I agree with that consensus,” Hosterman said Tuesday.
The commissioners also agreed, and Centre County commissioner Mark Higgins called it “fabulous” that the county was able to fully fund two requests through the grant program, as opposed to partially funding all of them.
While Higgins said that year’s CDBG money was already secured and “in the bank” before being allocated, the future of the grant program has been in jeopardy, with the Trump administration looking to deeply-cut or eliminate the federally-funded program.
Hope still remains for the program’s future though, as Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and John Kennedy, R-La. are proposing a bipartisan “Build Now Act” that would “encourage housing construction by boosting localities’ Community Development Block Grant funding when they improve their track record on building more housing, and adjusting it modestly when they do not.”
Higgins alluded to the act Tuesday, while also giving credit to those who have advocated for the program.
“We’d like to thank the citizens of Centre County and central Pennsylvania who have contacted their federal representatives [about saving the CDBG program] — it appears you’ve made a bit of a difference,” Higgins said. “I know the president wants it taken down to zero, but it appears that the Senate has said ‘no no.’ This is a great program does a lot of good, especially in lower income areas and in rural parts of the country.”