Christmas came a few days late this week for city of Batavia officials, but it was well worth it to open a package worth $350,000 in the form of a Community Development Block Grant, issued by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Office on Thursday.
Details will be ironed out over the next few months about how the money will be allocated and who the recipients will be for home improvement funding, Assistant City Manager Erik Fix said.
“We are very pleased to have received the CDBG Grant this year. It is a bit early for us to make any formal announcement and/or notifying eligible homeowners. Aside from the announcement, we have not received any information in regards to how or when the grant can be distributed,” he said Friday. “We have multiple trainings and webinars in the next couple of months and should have all of the details ironed out by late-winter, early spring in time for summer renovation projects.
“In the meantime, we do have funding available in the Batavia Home Fund,” he said. “The application and details can be found in the Citizen Action Center on our website, www.batavianewyork.com.”
Fix had previously said that the grant would coincide with the city’s comprehensive housing strategy “that we are in the process of developing.”
“It goes hand in hand with the Batavia Home Fund that the City, GCEDC and Town of Batavia signed an inter-municipal agreement to fund this past fall,” he had said to The Batavian earlier this year. “The CDBG will provide funding for rehabilitation projects on owner-occupied, single-family home rehab projects throughout the city. The hope is that when one neighbor makes improvements, others will as well, and the city can help foster rehabilitation throughout our communities.”
The Federal assistance Community Development Block Grant funds would enable homeowners to make home repairs with grant and deferred loan funding. Any single-family homeowner was encouraged to apply and the goal of the program was to provide “vibrancy to communities” similar to recent improvements made to Summit Street to create vibrant transformations throughout the city.
This program is to tie in with the city’s housing improvement plan and the recently created Batavia Home Fund.
Hochul said that 1,400 households will benefit from more than $46 million in grant awards to support affordable homeownership. The grants will help low- and moderate-income families make repairs or safety upgrades to their homes, replace manufactured homes, and provide down payment assistance for first-time buyers.
Batavia is part of the Finger Lakes region, which was awarded nearly $2.8 million in grant funding.
