All right, we're good.

We're good.

Okay.

Oh, yes.

Okay.

Oh.

All right.

Good evening, everyone.

We're gonna go ahead and get this CED meeting uh started.

Everyone on the committee is present.

We've got a bunch of pass-through grants to vote on.

Uh so with that said, uh Bill 13.

Um Bill 13 amends the 2026 grant fund to provide for a supplemental appropriation of 250,000 dollars from the PADCED local share account grant.

These funds are a pass-through grant that will support the resurrected community development corporation.

All right, thank you.

Any questions from the committee?

From the Dais, Miss Skissler, anything?

The only thing that I'm gonna start by saying is that all five of these are construction projects.

Okay, great.

Um, any questions from members of the public and all right, is there a motion to move forward?

I'll make a motion move it forward to full council favorably.

And second, I'll second.

All right, all in favor.

Aye.

So this will move forward.

I think to tonight, and then next is Bill 14.

Bill 14 amends the 2026 grant fund to provide for a supplemental appropriation of 400,000 from the PADCED local share account grant.

These funds are a pass-through grant that will support the Jewish community center of the Lehigh Valley.

Thank you.

Uh same deal.

Any questions from anyone on the dais?

And the administration, the public okay, is there a motion to move this forward?

Motion moving forward.

I'll second it.

All right, all in favor.

Aye.

So this will move forward.

Bill 15.

Bill 15 amends the 2026 grant fund to provide for a supplemental appropriation of 296,878 dollars from the PADCED local share account grant.

These funds are a pass-through grant that will support the Museum of Indian Culture.

Okay, thank you.

Any questions?

Any questions from the public?

Motion move forward.

Um I'll make a motion move it forward favorably.

Second.

I'll second it.

All right, all in favor.

Aye.

Aye.

All right, next vote.

Bill 16 amends the 2026 grants fund to provide for a supplemental appropriation of one million dollars from the state office of the budget redevelopment assistant capital program.

These funds are a pass-through grant that will support the bomb school of art.

Okay, thank you.

Any questions from the dais?

The administration, the public.

Uh is there a motion?

I'll motion to move this forward favorably.

I'll second it.

All right, all in favor.

Aye.

So this moves forward.

And is this the last one?

Yes, last one.

Bill 17 amends the 2026 grant fund for to provide for a supplemental appropriation of $75,000 from the PADCED local share account grant.

These funds are a pass-through grant that will support the Allentown Art Museum.

All right, thank you.

Um questions from anyone in the room.

No, okay, make a motion.

I'll make a motion to move it forward favorably.

And I'll second it.

All right, all in favor.

Aye.

Aye.

All right, so this moves forward uh favorably.

Um we got plenty of time, so I don't know if you have any updates, anything you want to.

I really don't have anything earth shattering.

Um, we have some uh positions posted within DCED from retirements coming up.

Um those interviews are going well.

We've completed scoring for uh the CDBG applications.

Thank you, Ms.

Gurlock, for scoring with us.

Now we're sitting tight and waiting for the award letter and the allocation and the go-ahead to be able to move forward in that process.

Um works is moving ahead.

The contracts are on the agenda for the AEDC board with partners to get started.

Uh that board meeting is tomorrow.

All of the contracts except one that had a legal typo that needed to go back through routing, uh, will be hopefully approved and uh partner work can start with Allentown Works.

Um planning department is hard at work gathering some data about uh development opportunities.

We have a data um data center ordinance that is sitting with the planning commission at this point for their comments, which once we have their comments, we'll be bringing that back to all of you.

We have the vacant and at-risk property ordinance in law for its final uh law draft revision, and then we'll be bringing that uh to council for your review.

Trying to think if there's anything else, earth shattering.

I don't really think there's much else.

Does anyone have any specific questions or any topics that you wanted an update on?

Anyone on the committee?

Um I saw I saw an article uh regarding the I believe it's RFPs for the toy factory and another property.

So how just give us a kind of a brief understanding of how that works, like what's the process and how the timeline.

First, if you read that article, we've reached out to Lindsay for corrections to that article.

That article misrepresents the relationship between RACA and the city and also refers to it as uh bids.

And we did not accept bids, we were accepting proposals, which is a totally different process.

And the relationship with RACA that was in that article implies that somehow RACA is not an independent authority.

We are staff support to that board, but that board makes the final decisions on acquisitions and dispositions of property.

So we asked Lindsay to make some corrections in that article.

Um, these are the first two since I'm with the Department of DCED that we are actually putting out an RFP request for proposals on.

Uh, one is 540 Hamilton and the other is the toy factory.

And what we did is we wrote a very generic request for proposals because we're interested in entertaining whatever the community would like to see in both of those places.

We put that RFP out as far and wide as we possibly could to everyone that gets our traditional RFPs, but also to community-based organizations, 501c3s, anybody that we could pass the RFP to.

Uh we had a technical session to help uh agencies enroll in Penbid, which is how uh RFPs are now received.

Um we had a good turnout for that.

We worked with Kevin Easterling and his team to make sure that they knew how to utilize Penbid to be sure that anybody and everybody who is interested in submitting a proposal submits a proposal.

Um I believe those proposals are due.

Don't quote me on this, but I think it's the beginning of April.

And um then when those proposals come in, a subset of the uh RACA board along with a staff support person will look at the proposals first, separate from the cost bid, just like the city does, and look at the proposals they're most interested in, perhaps narrow it down to the top three.

The uh walkthroughs were very well attended from people far and wide on both of those sites.

So we do anticipate that we should get numerous proposals on each site, and then the board will narrow it down and hopefully be able to um repurpose both of those buildings.

Okay, thank you.

You're welcome.

Good to have some background on that.

Okay, anyone else?

Uh Mr.

Pungle?

Sure, thank you.

Thank you.

I just want to say the work that you know, Kevin Easterling's doing.

I attended two of those sessions.

It's really great work to get small businesses set up here in Allentown.

A lot of folks who find this to be great opportunities for them to get involved in construction, so gotta commend that.

Um, I'm just curious, are there any grants you guys are particularly eyeing or anything that you know is of interest, anything that you know we can do to help get more grant opportunities?

Um, that's a great question.

Um, back first to um Kevin and Kevin's uh Black Heritage Group.

Um, right now they're partnered with the city.

We're providing free training through our community housing program to any of those individuals who are interested in becoming certified in lead abatement so that we can partner more heavily with our local smaller groups to be able to handle our conversion of homes to lead safe homes.

So that's going extremely well.

And then we are also looking at um we're gonna have to face some decisions moving forward.

Right now, our redevelopment authority and our city team neither do rehabs.

That's not the work that we've ever traditionally done since I'm involved in these programs.

But we're we don't have enough community housing organizations, chotos they refer to.

And a portion of our home dollars are designated to a CHOTO, a community housing organization that is a particular um dedication by HUD for that organization to be able to do housing work.

So we are kind of actively looking for some grassroot chotos.

We we lost um HADC uh when Dave Evans retired.

We no longer have HADC.

CALV is spread kind of thin with a lot of their housing uh fund cuts, then them being spread across the valley.

They've been working with us on our whole home repair, which is going very well, but they don't have the bandwidth to take on all of the RACA rehabs.

So it is going to be interesting how we move forward.

And we have enlisted the help of one of the national housing experts who helped us with our home welcome home study to give us some recommendations.

We're hoping that she's going to be able to also give us some recommendations on the deliverables we identified in our housing study to be able to come to you not just with ideas but with ideas that have actual price tags and budgets and details fleshed out.

With regard to grants, we were very disappointed, and we just had the meeting today with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh because we were not awarded the grant that we really wanted, which was going to help us rehab 10 homes that ideally then would be converted to owner-occupied homes.

I couldn't believe it when we had the rehab discussion.

We were in a stellar position to receive this funding, but we didn't dive deep enough, and it was a five-point deep dive, which essentially was our first attempt at this.

But you had to prove that you had donated properties, and it wasn't that RACA could donate to us or we could donate to the city.

We think that now we have the bandwidth and the wherewithal, and we will be able to come up with a plan that I'm hoping will be funded, but there aren't a lot of grants out there right now for housing rehab because it's so expensive.

And one of the things that I'm learning with our funeral home project that there was always a requirement, and I think it's referred to as BABA by American, by I don't remember what BAB is a bi American by, it was the law that passed that said that 10% or more of the steel utilized in a in a project had to be steel from the United States.

That's been in existence for years.

In 2022, that was expanded to 10% of all of the everything you buy for that rehab using federal dollars has to be made in the United States.

That 10% requirement is now changing the estimate on the funeral home by over 180,000 because the American made 10% products are in the supply chain issue, and the costs have skyrocketed.

So we are now facing a whole different price point in some of these rehabs than we've ever faced before.

And it's one of the discussions we're going to have with HUD because it's taking longer to complete their projects because we can't get the supplies that we need.

So it's a disincentive again for a developer to work with us utilizing federal funds when it's going to cause the unit cost per unit to skyrocket.

So we're kind of caught between some rocks and hard places, but we're finding that we can acquire some of these grants, but there's just a lot of developers who tell us financially they can't work with the federal money.

So that's an ongoing challenge.

Anyone else?

Anyone in the public?

Yeah.

Ms.

Tomblison?

Just say your name and address.

So Mary Tomlinson 373 West Liberty Street.

Hang on, excuse me, there's a button.

I'm Mary Tomlin Simmett.

I live at 373 West Liberty Street.

And I'm a social worker in the community.

Thank you for some all that you do to guide these investments in our community.

Beautiful stuff.

And I was just wondering with the Allentown Works program who the contracting partners are.

So and I'm assuming that they would be like who we could direct our friends to for getting employment and that sort of thing.

There will be a process released shortly that will discuss exactly how to refer someone into Allentown Works.

All of the partners play a plethora of different roles in those five categories.

So we have a long list of partner agencies, some that are assisting daycares, community services for children, resurrected life, we'll be assisting our family-based daycares or any daycare who wants to increase their Keystone Stars rating.

We have transportation partners, including Community Bike Works and VIA and a number Atlanta and a number of others about meeting transportation needs of folks who sign up for the program.

We have workplace training partners.

I can think, and I don't want to exclude anybody, I'm just thinking off the top of my head.

But we have L TriC, we have the Workforce Board, we have our labor unions, we have Century Promise, we have a number of organizations that are going to work with workplace training needs.

In actually acquiring a site and renovating a site to bring small business into a neighborhood.

So there's a long list of partners, but we believe by the middle to the end of the next quarter, we'll actually have partner programming in place enough that we can circulate to all of you on social media, in the newspaper, wherever we can get it out to, the way an individual who qualifies for the program can enroll.

And certainly, Mr.

Thompson, we can make sure that you get that information for any of the clients or people that you serve.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Okay.

I think that might be it, unless anyone else has anything.

No.

So one thing is it wouldn't have to be right now because I think it would need to be some hard numbers.

That one, do we spend 300 on the people who walk around and like tell you where restaurants are on Hamilton?

The D yeah, the DAA.

Yeah, those can could they come in and like give us an update on how they're doing in terms, not just like the ambassadors, but just as a program, they're supposed to like, you know, increase like entrepreneurialship and all that.

Absolutely.

Um, they've hired a new director.

Her name is Lisa.

I can certainly ask Lisa if she can come in and provide an update as to what they've been doing in partnership with the United Way, where they're at, and what some of the goals and objectives are.

But I can tell you that I did meet with them today, and that I will be coming back to you as well as Lisa as well as the mayor and President Um Napoli about the committees forming and the fact that folks can get actively involved in the different committees under DAA.

Okay, great.

That'd be wonderful.

Super thank you.

Uh, if there's nothing else, one last call, then I will conclude this meeting.

Thank you.

Thank you.