Butler County Courthouse

A finding from the state may require county agencies to repay $99,000 to the county as a whole, but there’s a catch.

The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) has found the Butler County Housing and Redevelopment Authorities must repay Community Development Block Grant funds to the actual grant recipient, in this case, Butler County. However, the finding requires repayment to come from the authorities’ internal funds not attached to any state or federal funding.

“Now, there goes $100,000 we don’t have to help people with housing in Butler County,” Ed Mauk, executive director of the authorities, said. “That’s the frustrating part.”

The Butler County commissioners are challenging the finding, according to commissioners Chairwoman Leslie Osche. They say the issue is a technicality.

The Butler County Housing and Redevelopment Authorities completed home improvement work on homes of low- to moderate-income residents in the county through the Owner-Occupied Rehabilitation Program. The authority used Community Development Block Grant funds awarded to the county in 2018 or 2019, Ed Mauk said Thursday.

Records about the home improvement work, and many other documents stored in the authority’s office, were destroyed or lost when a broken pipe flooded the office on Dec. 31, 2022. The record of an environmental review required for the home improvement work could not be found by the authority during an internal review conducted after the flood, Mauk said.

So, the authority recreated the review document, placed a memo explaining what had occurred in the file and the commissioners approved it. However, DCED flagged it because the date placed on the recreated environmental review was later than the date on the work contracts, Mauk said.

The home improvement services were delivered so, “we don’t just sit back and accept it,” Osche said Wednesday.

“We do a really good job of running these programs to help people that need help. The irony is we found it and corrected it. They don’t like how we corrected it,” Mauk said.

He said no issues or problems were found in the environmental review. The residents who received the home improvements met income and other guidelines, the completed work met program requirements and there have been no allegations of fraud, he said.

“In over 30 years, I’ve never seen something so trivial manifest itself in a repayment,” said Mauk.

“Investments in housing, particularly housing improvements, are important as is pointed out by the governor’s statewide housing action plan. We’re trying to indicate that it’s important that those services were delivered and provided to the consumers, and those housing upgrades were made, so we’re challenging their efforts to recoup that money on a technicality,” Osche said.

The commissioners received a repayment agreement April 30 from DCED. Solicitor Julie Graham found an error in the agreement, which DCED acknowledged, but the county is now waiting for DCED to send a revised version of the agreement, officials said at Wednesday’s commissioners meeting.

Osche said DCED wants the county to reprogram the money to another CDBG funded project, but timelines connected to those grant funds make reprogramming complicated. She said she hopes all the money won’t have to be reprogrammed.

Efforts to reach DCED for comment have not been successful.

Other CDBG-funded projects were also addressed at the commissioners’ meeting.

The commissioners reprogrammed $222,166, which was awarded to Summit Township for a stormwater project several years ago that never came to fruition, to Butler Township to help pay for its ongoing stormwater project. Osche said Summit Township returned the money to the county because it wasn’t spent in the allotted time.

A $67,400 contract for Slippery Rock’s storm sewer project was awarded to Robinson Pipe Cleaning of Pittsburgh, which submitted the lowest of three bids.