This community's latest appeal for cash from one of its most reliable funding sources sounds perfectly reasonable at first.
What the village asked for — and got — from the Governor's Office for Small Cities was a $400,000 grant to replace 1,720 household water meters, said to be losing accuracy with age.
Its application hit all the right notes: shockingly low income levels; an explosive growth rate; a mandate from the state to conserve water. But did anyone at the state agency stop to wonder how replacing meters would help the village recover 160,000 gallons a day of "lost" water, as it was led to believe?
Every year since 2000, when New York opened the Small Cities office to ladle out community development block grants from the federal government, Kiryas Joel has sought a piece of the action, competing with hundreds of towns, villages, cities and counties around the state.
And every year, Kiryas Joel has come up a winner. All told, it has racked up nearly $3.9 million over seven years, the fifth highest total of 1,282 eligible communities.
There is no evidence that any money was outright misspent — as happened in 1989 and 1990, when Kiryas Joel diverted $100,000 in federal funds for a medical clinic to pay for a school swimming pool and a drainage pipe.
But a closer look at two of the Small Cities-funded projects — the water meters and a chicken slaughterhouse that opened in 2004 — raises questions about whether they have achieved, or could ever achieve, goals the village set in its applications.
It also provides a master class in creative grant-writing by a community famous for its success in that arena.
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061231/NEWS/612310331
--
Posted by Chaptzem to Chaptzem Blog! at 12/31/2006 12:10:00 PM
