ARP Committee 7/13 and 8/17

So I am a little behind on this blog post. I am going to combine the two meetings into one to save time.

7/13

$25M Affordable Housing Gap Financing, $9M Housing First Supportive Services, $9M Temporary House Gaping, $7M Landlord Engagement and Competitive Grants

I know there were several community members and councilmembers who had questions regarding several of the items. The following were the documents shared with the committee during the presentation. The second batch was shared with the council. I deferred the four legislation until the first meeting in October to give everyone time to submit questions and hopefully have a work session.

8/17

$10M Workforce Development- Nashville State and Urban League of Middle TN

We had several unanswered questions that we expect to be answered when they come back to present to us. No vote was taken. Workforce development is an item we have talked about funding for a long time. Some of the highlights include a mobile classroom with Wi-Fi capability. There would be two pathways (Secondary education and workforce).

The plan did lack a couple of details that they will work on getting us.

  • How many people will this serve

  • Number of instructors and salary amounts. (I did notice that some of the salary amounts were bigger than we have seen in other proposals. We were informed that some represent multiple instructors under a specific amounts.)

  • List of partners and their plans since they will be providing wrap around services.

  • Expected average salaries graduates of the program will receive

  • Curriculum with more details.

  • Deliverables.

$10M- Burrus Hall Incubation Center

There were several concerns regarding the use of ARP funds to fund a capital project for a private institution. Which I tend to agree with. This is already an existing building that would need to be updated. There would need to be fundraising later on to have the building be fully operational. It would be heavily STEM focused and open to everyone in Nashville not just Fisk students. No vote was taken.

$10M- Participatory Budgeting

We were running short on time and did not get a chance to fully discuss the item. There were concerns of the money being used on few capital projects and not making an impact. The survey that we conducted was also brought up. Granted the number of people who actually filled it out was disappointing. The money would be distributed using the CDC’s socially vulnerable index. This would give more money to areas that were more heavily impacted by the pandemic. I asked for them to share a breakdown of what the funding would look like for different parts of town. No vote was taken.

I do believe it is important to slow down as we are coming down to our last few millions. We did receive the list of proposals that have been submitted that we have not heard. The idea is to prioritize at our next meeting who would like to hear from.

Sandra Sepulveda