Agenda - 06-15-1999 - III - Laserfiche WebLink

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Friday 4 June 1999 To: Orange County Commissioners Alison Weiner I JUN I From. 4 1999 Member, Initial Board of Directors I J, Community Land Trust In Orange County Re: funding for part-time staff person for FY 1999 -2000 Thank you for receiving my remarks at the public hearing last night. Following is a summary of my remarks for your reference, and some additional details regarding our request for your information. The Community Land Trust of Orange County was officially incorporated on May 11th. We have By -laws in place as well as our Initial Board of Directors. We will contract Orange Community Housing Corporation to manage all administrative tasks for the Land Trust (as suggested by both the County Manager and the Chapel Hill Town Manager). During the coming year, we will be focusing our efforts on Scarlette Drive, a fourteen- townhouse development in Chapel Hill being developed by OCHC. The Town of Chapel Hill is donating the land. We hope to commence construction this fall. Financing the project is dependent on pre - selling the units, and so we need to begin marketing the homes this summer. Since our presentation to you last fall, we have received an eighteen -month Technical Plan of Assistance from HUD. This Plan includes a total of twenty -three (23) days of Technical Assistance (at no cost to us). It also included $4000 to send four folks to the National Community Land Trust Conference this past April (Tara Fikes, Loryn Barnes, Robert Dowling and I attended). The Plan also strongly recommends that we hire a part-time staff person to assist in administering the land trust tasks. HUD will provide a $10,000 matching grant (over the eighteen -month period), provided we receive approximately 2:1 support from our community. This staff person will focus on tasks unique to the land trust model, which involve educating potential homebuyers and the public about the land trust; and providing on -going support for homeowners once they become land trust residents. OCHC, on behalf of the Land Trust, has submitted funding requests for $8000 from Orange County, $8000 from Chapel Hill, $1000 from Carrboro and $1000 from Hillsborough. Our request has been included in the budgets for Chapel Hill and Carrboro. The County Manager has not included our request in the County budget. Though our first project is in Chapel Hill, the Community Land Trust in Orange County has been established to serve the County and can play a critical role in the creation of long -term affordable housing for our towns and our rural communities. Though there have been good efforts made to create affordable housing, unfortunately, with regard to homeownership, housing does not remain affordable. With a land trust, once a subsidy is placed in a property, it stays with the property. We certainly applaud the County and its citizens for its commitment to quality education. At the same time, if we want to maintain, if not enhance, the diversity of our community, if we want to continue to be able to house our teachers and government employees and child care workers and all folks at all income levels, we need to step up our support of housing initiatives. Orange County now has its first (and presently its only) effective tool for keeping housing affordable, and that is the Community Land Trust of Orange County. In establishing this organization, we have made every effort to, and will continue our commitment to, utilize and partner with existing resources. By contracting OCHC to handle the administrative tasks, we eliminated the need for establishing a new office and hiring an Executive Director up front. We are also very fortunate to be able to draw on the experiences from the existing 120 CLT's across the country through our Technical Plan of Assistance as well as by becoming a part of the CLT network. As we are already beginning our work, we see how critical it will be for us to employ a part-time staff person. Our modest request for $8000, which will leverage a $10,000 HUD grant, will be greatly appreciated and allow us to effectively begin our service to the County.