Consortia Working Group

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Summary of ConPlan Improvement Initiative Consortia Working Group Conference Calls

Conference Call Summary Notes
Thursday, September 5, 2002
3:30 PM

Participants:
Co-Chairs: Robert Goulka (HUD - OAHP), Tom Laurin (San Bernardino Co., CA)
Members: Scott Cleveland (HUD - Boston Field Office), Ed Gramlich (Center for Community Change), Dave Larson (San Bernardino Co., CA), Terry Manning (South Florida Regional Planning Council).

Aspen/ComCon: Grace Morris

Grace began the meeting by briefly bringing the Group up to speed on the Steering Committee call scheduled to take place on September 10. The group then moved on to briefly discuss the material Grace had sent to them on monitoring performance and the Draft Summary of Ideas from the Consortia Group.

Some members felt that a more structured format for the Plan could be beneficial because giving communities flexibility doesn't seem to be working all that well in terms of really seeing creativity. Most follow the guidelines or the regs. The bigger grantees do seem to take advantage of the flexibility and would be concerned about requiring a structure. San Bernardino County offered to share a matrix they developed which outlines the statute and regs and tells a reviewer of their Plan where they can be located in the document. This saves time for elected officials, advocates and the HUD Field Office staff in reviewing the document and also reduces the number of questions the San Bernardino staff has to answer because it is easier to locate items of interest in the document. This matrix will be sent to Grace. It was offered for consideration as an existing pilot idea for streamlining and making the ConPlan more useful. It was discussed that maybe the Executive Summaries could follow a set format since that may be more helpful to the public. It was expressed that often times the Executive Summaries are simply too general, too much PR and that the real document must be read for the important details.

It was discussed that the narrative entered in to IDIS now covers accomplishments but it is not easy to extract that for data. Agreed that there are probably some overall common activities - Rehab, Public facilities, Services, Slum and Blight elimination, Economic Development that could be measured nationally in some way.

Donna Anderson who works on IDIS for the HOME office joined the call to discuss the new IDIS pages. Donna indicated that these are posted now on the site for review and comment and encouraged all members to take some time to look at them and provide feedback.

Group then looked at the Draft Summary of ideas. It was mentioned that there continue to be problems with getting the grant agreements out in a timely manner. It was suggested that pre-signed grant agreements would be helpful and also the group wondered if it was possible given how appropriations are funded annually to make 2 year authorizations. It was offered that this is done on other programs. Supportive Housing was mentioned.

The elimination of the CD Non-Housing Plan was discussed again. Many feel this is significant especially for Consortia. By and large it sounds as if the lead agency and the participating members address the housing issues in a comprehensive manner but that each member addresses the CD Non-Housing themselves and that kind of gets tacked on to the end. The revised approach being offered by the States since it is a statutory requirement is to allow for a pilot to submit the information in a different format. The Consortia Working Group will also support this pilot.

Under Alternative planning the group discussed utilizing Continuum of Care (CoC) for the homeless needs section. Right now many communities are already doing a "cut and Paste" from CoC to ConPlan so why not just be allowed to reference it? It was suggested that HUD should coordinate internally so that the CoC Plan and ConPlan for a community are matching now. It was suggested that in almost all jurisdictions, advocates are intimately involved with the CoC process so nothing would be a surprise to them if it gets referenced in ConPlan.

The group again discussed the data issue and again reached no real consensus because everyone has experienced different things regarding the use of locally developed data and most have differing opinions as to what HUD can do if anything about this issue based on the regs.

It was agreed that Grace would revise the Summary of Ideas per the call and redistribute it again for one last review by the Group prior to final submission to the Steering Committee. It is expected that the Final Report will be submitted to the Assistant Secretary for consideration sometime in October.

At this time no further meetings of the Consortia Group are scheduled.