Mayor Friedberg has good news in his latest blog post. Bellaire city staff has been applying for multiple disaster recovery and mitigation grants and their hard work has paid off!
According to the Mayor, “Based on the levels of damage we experienced in the presidentially declared disasters of Memorial Day 2015 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017, we were allocated $252,033.84 and $4,095,702.00, respectively. The award of those allocations was not automatic, however. The first hurdle we had to overcome was the CDBG low-to-moderate income benefit requirement. Once that was satisfied (on a countywide basis), the specific projects for which we’d applied, the local street and drainage improvements in Group C Phase 3 of our 2016 bond program, had to be approved. Now that they have been, we’ll be able to pay for most if not all of them with CDBG funds rather than with new debt.”
He goes on to explain that “Earlier this year I reported that an August 2019 bond issuance for streets and drainage, and a November 2019 bond election, would no longer be necessary because a combination of unused sidewalk money and cost savings from earlier phases would be enough to keep our progress going for at least another year. This $4.35 million in CDBG-DR funding buys us yet another year of progress with no new debt, allowing us to again revise our projections. Over the next five years our debt service tax rate is further reduced by an average of 5.93% (1.04 cents), and total debt by an average of 9.79% ($13.97 million), per year”
We echo Mayor Friedberg when he says “Congratulations and special thanks to the city staff, including Development Services, City Engineer, Public Works and Finance, for all their hard work on our grant applications.”
See the Mayor’s full blog post here.
