During Tuesday’s work session meeting at City Hall, the mayor & commission previewed plans from the Housing & Community Development Department (HCD), such as initiatives for affordable housing and community programs and homelessness services. A new proposed project concept was also presented in regard to the ongoing developments for the Traffic Safety plan.
Mayor Kelly Girtz started the meeting by announcing that all work sessions will take place at noon on the second Tuesday of each month and be held at the Athens-Clarke County Planning Department located at 120 W. Dougherty St. Changes will be in effect Tuesday, April 2 and continue monthly.
Melinda Lord, assistant director of HCD, gave presentations outlining community programs and its respective funding for fiscal year 2025, such as affordable and accessible housing as well as community enrichment programs.
The HCD’s highest priority for its consolidated plan goals is affordable housing, with the main initiative being to increase the amount of safe and suitable housing for low and moderate-income ACC residents. In doing so, HCD hopes to provide access to expanded economic opportunities and help households access and maintain affordable housing.
The HCD has $1,930,103 available for the FY 2025 proposed home projects.
Lord presented projects that the HCD is working on to target communities based on its housing needs, such as new construction and renovations for both single-family Lenders mortgage insurance (LMI) and multi-family LMI homes, and down payment assistance for single-family LMI homebuyers.
Targeted areas for construction and updates for family rental and homebuyer units are Savannah Heights and Micah’s Creek, and locations on Colima Avenue, Reese Street. and Ruth Street.
Still, HCD has a gap in its housing funding needs. There is a $2,923,313 gap between its available funding and application funding requests.
Contracting will happen between May and June 2024 for all projects, and funding will be available on July 1, 2024, for the 2025 fiscal year.
Other plans HCD has been working on since 2021 that will be continued in 2025 are economic development and workforce development, education and enrichment, homeless services, special populations and public infrastructure.
ACCGov Traffic Engineer Tim Griffeth presented updates for a proposed project concept for the Traffic Safety Improvements Project.
The main goal is to update traffic signal equipment. The recommended lifespan for this equipment is 13 years, and there are approximately 40 intersections that have signal equipment that is 40 years old or older. According to Griffeth, this presents problems, since the further a traffic signal equipment is used past its lifespan the higher both the maintenance cost becomes, as well as the threats to the safety and efficiency of the traffic signal system are to the public.
To improve this, ACCGov traffic and signal systems engineers of the Traffic Safety Improvements project are working on developing criteria for judging each traffic signal system in Athens to determine priority spots for updating outdated traffic signal systems.
