The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently designated Butler County as urban for the Community Development Block Grant program, but for various reasons, nine municipalities opted out of the grant.

Those municipalities that opted out are Allegheny, Buffalo, Forward, Muddy Creek, Oakland and Worth townships; the City of Butler and Karns City and West Liberty boroughs.

“I can’t speak for all of them, but I was able to speak with a few of them. Some of them did not like the fact that we were doing this so quickly, but were not given a choice by HUD, as it was a very quick and very short turnaround,” said Wendy Leslie, Community Development Block Grant county administrator.

The grant will provide funding primarily for water and sewer improvement projects. The county was notified about the opportunity Aug. 11 by email and subsequently met with all 57 municipalities so they could decide whether to opt in or out of the program by Sept. 8. The application was due Sept. 15.

Leslie added that she didn’t think many of the municipalities that opted out actually understood what CDBG did or how the grant worked. She also speculated that some could have been hesitant about the cooperation agreement.

Worth Township was one of the nine municipalities that opted out, and officials were able to confirm some of what Leslie said while adding their own insight.

“They presented the grant opportunity to us and they told us we had to make a decision in a week and a half. So, because we had to be in agreement with the county and we didn’t have enough time to review it, and to be honest, our township doesn’t seem to have any luck with grants,” Worth Township Supervisor Shari Kreutz said of opting out of the program.

The county claims it was notified about the opportunity on Aug. 11, but according to Kreutz, Worth Township wasn’t notified until Aug. 28 and didn’t have a meeting about it until Sept. 1, which gave them only a week to decide.

Forward Township is another of the municipalities that opted out. Supervisor Chairwoman Susan Oliver-Stough stated the township is not a recipient of CDBG grants and does not anticipate ever trying to receive one.

“We went through quite a drill to respond to the county's request in order to meet a short HUD deadline. We are not willing to sign a blanket document that mandates we hold harmless any entity before an action is taken. We also felt the civil rights statement that we were asked to sign had no place in the discussion,” Oliver-Stough said.

“Additionally, we know we cannot get our residents to divulge all their finances to the government in order to prove we meet the economic threshold required of the grant program,” she added.

Leslie said CDBG money is not used to build low-income housing, but the money can be used to rehabilitate housing for people who qualify.

“We don’t build new with CDBG because that is something we are not allowed to do, so we prioritize any type of new water, sewage or stormwater is priority,” Leslie said. “In low-income areas, we have also done road construction and housing rehab to keep people in homes longer.”

She also made it clear that because the nine opted out, they can no longer receive state funding and are not eligible to receive any CDBG funding over the three years that were offered, with the exception of Butler, which receives its own CDBG allocation.

Mayor Bob Dandoy said city council chose to opt out as it would risk losing the roughly $300,000 it already receives at no benefit to the city’s usage of its funds.

Even with the low-to-moderate income population, he said trading the guaranteed funds the city already receives was too big to risk getting less.

“Some of the smaller municipalities don’t have projects, or they can’t get it done within the three-year window,” he said. “I said, ‘Mark (Gordon, planning commission chairman), we have none of those problems.’ Every year, we’re going, ‘send us the money, we’ve got a project.’

“We were going to give up a guaranteed third of a million dollars to the possibility that we might get more. But there’s also the possibility we could get nothing.”