Coalition Challenges County on Affordable Housing Spending, Cooperation

Members of the housing group said they are frustrated by Transylvania County's delays in spending affordable housing grant money. The county says it is complying with the grant's terms.

Transylvania County administration building in downtown Brevard

BREVARD — What’s Transylvania County doing for affordable housing?

Karen Gleasman, representing the Brevard-Transylvania Housing Coalition, asked this question during Monday’s County Commission meeting. And she added some barbed comments about the $2 million affordable housing grant the county received from Dogwood Health Trust in 2021.

“What you’ve not done with this grant is lift one shovel for affordable housing,” Gleasman said, adding that this delay has been cited by Dogwood as a reason to turn down applications for housing grants from other members of the Coalition.

“In essence, your inactivity is blocking other organizations,” Gleasman said.

Her presentation is part of a Coalition effort, borne of frustration, to draw the county into open conversation about addressing the county’s dire shortage of reasonably priced homes and apartments, said Shelly Webb, the executive director of Sharing House.

She is also a leader of the Coalition, made of representatives from public and private groups that have banded together to tackle the crisis.

Yes, county Planning and Community Development Director Jeff Adams has been a knowledgeable and engaged member of the Coalition, Webb said, but he hasn’t been able to share details of the county’s available funds or broad plans.

So, Gleasman said at the meeting, the Coalition plans a series of miniature presentations during the public comment sections of coming Commission meetings.

“Of course we understand this won’t be much of a two-way dialogue but we can share a lot during three-minute snippets over the next several months,” Gleasman said Monday. 

County Manager Jaime Laughter pushed back.

The terms of the Dogwood grant never called for it to be used for housing construction, the lifting of shovels, Laughter said.

Much of the Dogwood money was earmarked for a utility extension project that has been completed with money from other sources.

The grant agreement also called for some of the funds to pay for the 2022 engineering study of the potential to extend the utility system that serves the Burlingame community and is owned by the Town of Rosman. Another portion was designated for a comprehensive housing study that is nearly complete.

Dogwood, she said, has raised no objections about Transylvania’s use of its grant or said it strands in the way of requests from other local groups.

Most of all, Laughter expressed outrage that the county could be accused of a lack of collaboration.

Pointing to Adams’ involvement, she said, “we are part of the Housing Coalition and it is upsetting to have public comment attacking the county and the work that we have been doing, especially at the staff level.”

The Money

So how much county money is available to help with affordable housing, not only from the Dogwood grant, but from another potential source, the remnants of the $13.7 million worth of allocations in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money the county received in 2021?

When NewsBeat emailed that question to Laughter on Tuesday, she didn’t directly answer but said such information should be available in past agenda packets.

An extensive search of those documents and past communication from the county didn’t reveal a definitive answer, and Laughter didn’t answer several follow-up emails seeking clarification.

But the search did turn up the Commission’s approval, in December of 2021, of the Dogwood grant agreement.

This includes the elements Laughter outlined at Monday’s meeting, as well as a stipulation that if the $1.6 million dedicated to infrastructure is not used for that purpose, it would be set aside “to further enhance the strategic approach to meeting community housing needs,” a county document said.

These needs will be clearer once the housing study is completed early next year, Laughter said at Monday’s meeting, and the use of remaining Dogwood funds will “line up with the implementation of the housing study very nicely.”

The agenda packets also allowed the tracking of the complicated history of the county’s use of its ARPA funding.

The terms of the first, $6.7 million ARPA grant — part of which was once tagged for the extension of Rosman’s utility lines along the US 64 corridor — allowed small counties such as Transylvania to use this money for “revenue replacement” according to a document prepared for a Commission meeting in March of 2023. Laughter later said the funds could help address the county’s many capital needs.

A separate $7 million allocation, approved by the state legislature, was at one point earmarked for a Rosman water plant. When that plan didn’t work out for a variety of reasons, part of this money was later directed to the US 64 utilities project, which Laughter has said came in under budget.

And in June of 2023, the Commission agreed to seek approval to devote the remainder of ARPA money for other projects, including an engineering study and the planned connection between the Rosman and the city of Brevard water systems.

The clearest picture of the current status of the county’s ARPA funds came in an exchange this week between Laughter and Brevard City Manager Wilson Hooper.

He sent a letter on Monday that referenced “approximately $3 million” in county ARPA funds, and proposed two options for its use in support of affordable housing. One of these included $636,000 to extend sewer lines to a 7.8-acre parcel west of downtown Brevard, where Transylvania Habitat for Humanity plans to build 49 residential units.

Another option, he wrote, was for the county to commit $1.8 million to pay for some of the work to extend utility lines to an underserved neighborhood just east of the city limits. This would boost the city’s chance of securing a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant that would pay for the rest of that $4.7 million project.

Time is of the essence, he added, both because ARPA funds must be committed by the end of this year and because the city faces an even tighter deadline for applying for the HUD grant.

Laughter’s response corrected Hooper, telling him that while the figure he mentioned “is in the ballpark” of the amount of county ARPA money that hasn’t been spent, it has been committed to other projects.

The Commission could vote to change these commitments, she wrote, but not in time to meet the city’s deadline. “We are reconciling the projects originally put towards the ARPA funds to see what amounts we will have available, so that will not go back to the Commission until October or November,” she wrote to Hooper.

But Laughter also reiterated the county’s earlier support of the city’s HUD grant application and held out hopes for future collaboration with the city using other funding sources, including the $10 million infrastructure earmark the county received from the state last year.

Still, Angie Hunter, the executive director of Habitat and a member of the Coalition, said she had high hopes the ARPA money would be available for the group’s project west of downtown. It’s by far Habitat’s most ambitious initiative to date, and upon hearing it would not be funded, she said Wednesday, “I’m very disappointed.”

Urgency

She and Webb also explained the urgency of active collaboration from the county.

Both Habitat and Sharing House have received some recent funding from Dogwood, they said, but applications for larger sums to boost affordable housing were rejected early this year.

“We didn’t even make it to the second round. They just told us, ‘Nope,’ ” Webb said.

Both Habitat and Sharing House received emails in February from Sarah Grymes, Dogwood’s vice president of housing, who wrote that the Foundation would look more favorably on applications showing “the potential for large collaborations and projects that intersect within multiple strategic priority areas.”

When Grymes attended a subsequent meeting of the Coalition, members pressed her for more details, Webb said. “That’s when she said nothing is going to happen until the study is completed.”

Though the plan for the study has been publicly reported and posted on the county’s website, Webb said she didn’t know about it until this meeting, and added, referring to the county, “they’ve been sitting on that grant for three years.”

A statement from Dogwood didn’t say whether or not the delay in completing the housing study was holding up other grants, but referred questions to the county, stating “Dogwood trusts our grantee partners to lead and implement the work they are funded to do.”

Though Gleasman acknowledged that her comments might have sounded confrontational — “I came out really pretty hot,” she said — that is not the Coalition’s intention.

The plan for speakers to appear at future meetings, Webb said, “is just to tell County Commissioners what our plans are and to request participation.”

And just as Laughter objected to Gleasman’s comments, Webb said she was disappointed with Laughter’s response.

“What concerns me is just the defensiveness. I think as members of the public we have a right to ask: What dwellings have been built in the past three years or what infrastructure has been laid? Communicate that,” she said. “We’re all in this together.”

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