Diversity & Community Relations Committee - Regular Meeting

You ready? Hey. Good evening and welcome to the city of Joliet Diversity and Community Relations Committee for Thursday, May 14 at 04:30 in the City Hall Council Chambers. Can we get roll call? Councilman Clement?

Here.

Councilman Moreno?

Here.

Councilwoman Ibarra? Here. Has everybody had an opportunity to look at the minutes of the 09/11/2025 diversity meet and community relations committee meeting?

Yes. I'm all good. Have no

questions or comments. Good.

Good.

Can we get a motion to approve?

Motion. Second.

All in favor. Motion passes. Citizen to be heard on agenda items. Are there any citizens we heard on agenda items? Seeing no citizens to be heard on agenda items, we're going to new or old business, not for final action or recommendation. Black joy update parade. Sorry. Black joy parade update.

Thank you. Thank

you. Thank you. Okay.

Alrighty. Alright. This is the overview. Say who

you are.

I'm sorry. Charlene Boyd, special events manager, City of Joliet. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Alrighty. Overview of the Black Joy Parade Joliet. The Joliet community is invited to celebrate culture, connection, and community spirit at the Black Joy Parade on Saturday, 08/29/2026 with the parade beginning at 1PM. This is a free family friendly event celebrating black heritage and history with attendees encouraged to line the streets, wave flags, and honor the contributions of the black community to Joliet's culture and economic legacy. The parade will begin at the intersection of Chicago Street and Benton Street and will continue south to Jefferson Street, east to Scott Street, and return north to Cass Street.

Following the parade, a community celebration will take place in City Square from 02:30 to 5PM, featuring a DJ, live van, food trucks, and a variety of retail and resource vendors. There's also a map on the second page in case you would like to see the actual layout for the parade will take place. The event is being organized through a collaborative effort involving the Joliet City Center Partnership, East and South Regional Alliance, City of Joliet, and a newly formed committee of black community leaders chaired by Boise Walker. The history as Black Pride Incorporated was co founded by the late Dale Evans in 1987 to promote the positive aspects of the black community. For twenty four years, Pride sponsored parades, recognition banquets, essay contests, youth activities, and gospel concerts.

After the passing of Dale L. Evans, the parade celebrations continued in his honor. Spearheaded by the Unity CDC, the twenty fifth Annual African American Heritage Parade was held on 09/22/2013, led by organizers Mac Willis, Betty Gavin, John King, and Ardell Evans with the theme Building Our Future with a Spirit of Self Pride. So this is the drafted schedule. The street closures will begin at 11AM. Chicago Street closure closer to 12PM. Vendor set up in City Square, 10:30AM. Parade line lineup begins at eleven. Parade begins at one Parade concludes at 02:30. And the after celebration is from 02:30 to five.

The back page kind of lists we have five different committees. They are registration committee, and you can see the those people that are participating in that committee. We also have a fundraiser and sponsorship committee, marketing and publicity committee, logistics and volunteers committee, and then the city's care activation committee. Each of there's actually a couple more members as well that don't actually participate in a committee, but they do provide their insight as well. Would you like me to go through each of the okay.

Can I ask the information though? Quick question. Yeah. Did you reach out or did anybody on any of these committees reach out to the original founders of this parade just to make sure? Yes. Okay. Like, Betty Gavin's on here and Dale our Dale Evans family, I know, is still around here. Yeah. I just wondered if anyone reached out to They are definitely aware. Okay. Good. Mhmm. That's all the questions I have.

Any other questions, anyone?

No. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. We're very excited.

Alright. Thank you.

Let us know if we

can help. Okay. Okay. I add one thing? Mhmm. Just so that you're all aware. So I I just wanna add that the parade this year will will have a limit of 50 units similar to the Mexican Independence Day Parade. And I'm only noting that just because it's something we're gonna be promoting. I'm looking forward to expanding it in future years. But since it's the first time back, it will be limited to the 50 units. K? What was that?

Do you

have a question? Do you

have a question?

Oh, yeah. I was gonna ask. What's the name of the the committee of the black community leaders? Or who's on the committee? Just just a question. Which committee? The the one chaired by Bosie Bosie Walker.

Garland Mays, Bosie Walker, Veronica Robinson, and I think those are the only four in

the Oh, okay.

Four in that actual committee.

Alright. Thank you.

Yeah. You're welcome.

Thank you, and welcome to the city of Joliet Chime. Thank you. Next, we are gonna have a CBDG update presentation by Bridget Rohr, CBDG program manager. Thank you. And also, welcome to the city of Joliet.

I'm very excited.

Thank you. Thank you. Sorry. No. You're

fine. Thank you.

Bridget Rohr, CDBG program manager for the City of Joliet. I wish and hope I could be as brief as that. There's a ton of information. So I encourage you to ask questions throughout. Don't feel as if you can't interrupt me because this can be a very lively good way to get feedback into how to proceed.

So I encourage that. I'm here today to talk about the CDBG, the Community Development Block Grant Program. We have a long history with HUD of receiving these funds. They are the projects go live October 1 and they end 09/30/2027. So we're in a constant cycle of where we accept and do the applications, then we start managing the projects, and then we start right back in.

So I I kinda wanna start with let's rewind back to 2025. The city council had approved our consolidated plan. Within that consolidated plan, we have to do one every five years. We also do an action plan once a year. Our consolidated plan, we go out to all the stakeholders, we talk to them, we talk to all of the sub recipients, and we go out to the public and we have open town halls and all that stuff in order to collect information on what the community needs.

Once we gather that information, we then compile it into the consolidated plan. As I said earlier, the city council approved that plan in September 2025 and we sent it to HUD and then HUD uses that information as to how we are allowed to spend those funds for the next five years. We must also consider eligibility as a part of the application process. As you see here, there are three main criteria. They're called the national the national objectives.

You must be a low to moderate income person or within a low to moderate income service area. Must be an urgent need. COVID is a great example of that. And or you must aid in the prevention or elimination of slum and blight. A popular project for that would be like demolition for creating vacant lots and cleaning things up. That being said, there are four categories that a project typically there are four categories that a project will fall into. One of which is public service, public facilities. I used capital improvements in public facilities interchangeably. So just kind of think about that as I talk. Economic development and administrative costs.

As you see in the chart there, the LMI amount, it actually takes effect June 1, is $68,000 for one single household family. So actually, I would say that's relatively, you know, the average here in Joliet. So most of our city does qualify within that. This year, we were allocated 924,000. We have a public service amount of 138,000 and $138,608 and capital improvements, facility improvements is $600,000 The reason why public service is at that amount is we have a 15% cap that we cannot go over.

So of that 924,000, we are only allowed to use 138,000 of that towards public service. That being said, you'll see in a minute the applications that we had come in. And that is by far our most competitive category. And then of course capital improvements, they typically run a little bit more expensive so that is the alternate funding. This year in order to receive applications, we did a ton of outreach.

We did five full days of open office hours where I sat in the conference room and had people come to me at any time throughout the day. We did one full day of virtual assistance and then we did personalized appointments. We also had stuff up on the website and we received only digital copies. Nobody asked for any paper applications. So that's encouraging to know that the application process is pretty simple.

And then this work

is kind of exciting because you can see the totals between 2025 and 2026. And from what I understand, 2025 was also a big year for applications. So we actually doubled our applications this year. We received 15 applications in 2025 and in 2026 we received over 33 applications. We also, the request amount for 2025 was $876,000 This year it was requested $2,400,000 Obviously it's going to be tight because we only got the $924,000 allocation.

Something worth noting that I feel is important to not only this committee but to the City of Joliet is that ARPA funds are running out. So a lot of people are trying to get those funds subsidized and by using the CDBG funds. Do you have a question?

No. I

was thinking in my head. Sorry.

Oh, okay. So

speaking of applications, we have to grade these applications. We got 33 of them in this year. There are criteria that we view that we review and there's a weighted scoring system is how it works. The first category is a con plan. Like does it align with our con plan? Does it meet the national objectives? Is it in a redevelopment area like an opportunity zone designate? Is it health and public safety? How many people does it help? Can we start shovel ready?

Are we ready to go? Budget realism is a very real problem that we have where somebody might submit one estimate to be done for something and, you know, they say, okay, it's a thousand dollars to get this roof done. And we go, oh, okay. And we give them a thousand dollars and then it turns out when they go to bid, it's a $20,000 project. So we have to take those type of things in consideration.

Along with past performance and compliance risk, you know, have they been a good, you know, participant with the City of Joliet in the past? Do they have the organizational capacity to handle doing this project? Are they putting any of their own funds in? Is this a long term solution? Or is it a short term? And then what kind of measurable outcomes?

Wow. Yeah.

So 2026, well in 2025, City Council approved for $170,000 to go into a owner occupied rehab program. We have not gone live with that just because as you know my first day was March 30 and the way the turnover happened with my predecessor, we just haven't been able to get it up and running. But we are making strides in that and so we're asking for another set aside of 170 this year. And as you can see the before and after picture, you know, we feel staff feels that it's a great improvement and it's something that we should focus on with our funds. So we're gonna be requesting that.

Quick question. I know you said owner occupied, but you know how sometimes we have a lot of rentals where the owner can live on the top floor and rent out the bottom. Does that still count or is that only for, like, a single family owner occupied homes?

I believe that that does count. I would have to go back to the regulations, but I'm almost certain that that would qualify.

Okay. Mhmm. Thank you.

Yeah. The good thing with CDBG funds is we are able to do the rehab on a property but then not holistically have to do the house. So that's something to keep in mind with this program is that, you know, we are able to do exterior, do ADA accessibility, put a new roof on, do new windows. We we that doesn't mean we have to go in and do all the plumbing and the electrical and all that because that can sometimes be tied to funding. So it's actually a CDBG is a great alternative to cleaning up houses and cleaning up neighborhoods and helping people afford the things that they can't afford.

The other set aside is our senior snow removal, which is a very, very, very, very, very popular program. Dustin made me aware of that on day one when he said, oh, we get all these calls and everybody's so excited about it. And it's something that we plan on asking for this year as well. That would be a 45,000 set aside. And with that, you know, we do have a question to pose to the committee about this.

As of right now, eligibility restrictions are you only have to be 62, live within the city, and you can put in an application and it's first come first served. It's been under consideration and mentioned before, perhaps we should tighten that in a little bit more because it is so sought after. And I believe last year the application was only live for a couple days before they had to stop taking applicants. It was

less than 24,

I think. Yeah, I think it was.

So can I jump in? Because we had that significant storm in November, remember we had about four or five inches. So I had the unique and enjoyable opportunity to talk to just about every senior snow recipient because, we used a different contractor. That contractor was non performing. We had to run them off and find a different contractor.

So, I I got to talk to everybody who didn't get served. Right? And, a lot of people said, oh, they didn't come. I had my neighbor's guy do it for me or I had my kids do it or I actually did it. So, there's folks who are signing up who just wanted it and far be it for me to determine over a phone call if you need it or not, but they were able to pivot immediately and find an alternative solution where we all know that there are many many people in this community that do not have alternative solutions.

So we're bringing it to you as an item of conversation, for you to guide us. Do you want us to tighten this up a little bit to make sure to help make sure. We can't make sure 100%. But to be a little bit more intentional that we serve our most vulnerable population or and it's a totally legitimate perspective. You know what? This is the application deadline. Get here first and you get it. That that's that's also a totally legitimate and defensible position as well. But we did think it was worth bringing to your attention for your feedback. And you don't have to you don't have to decide that right now but we are daylighting that.

You don't you have until basically the application period which is in October. So you don't don't feel like you're under the gun right

now

but we did wanna daylight that for you.

Thank you. Oh, just a real quick question. When you say tying up, basically, is this what the eligibility requirements that we have are these what we have now?

Yes. Yeah. So so in most so senior citizens are considered what's called a presumed eligibility group. So you can pretty much fund anything for a senior citizen and that's how we've been using this program in the past. However, HUD also gives us, remember when I talked about those LMI numbers, they also give us those as guidance if you're not a presumed eligibility.

So I would imagine that if we were to want to put eligibility in, you know, income verification in, that we would use the HUD standards already. And we would say, and I mean, I can go back to the slide, but it's in the packet. For the one single person, there's low, extremely low, and low to moderate. You could choose one of those categories as, you know, those people are that, they're first come entry.

I like talk about changing it. Because if you had a pivot, you don't need this. Like, if you immediately had a pivot in your pocket, you probably don't need this. I had a constituent that was, like, 90 years old on chemo. She needed to be shoveled out. But Yeah. There's a lot of people that just do

it in blood pressure. There's people in my gym that are 62 that can run, like, nine minute miles. Right? Mhmm. But under this, they would they would qualify if they got here first.

Yeah.

So Yeah. I I would like to, tighten it up. But Yeah. How do we go about that is another story.

If you wanna say, Bridget, Dustin, bring us back a plan for us to react to, we're we can absolutely

in agreement. Like, there's 62 year olds that are in better shape than most. Yeah. And and Yeah. Not taking anything away from them, but let's get the people that really need it financially. Their health is is poor. Yeah. You know, they live alone. They're handicapped. Those are the people we wanna focus on.

Okay. I agree. Thank you.

Yeah. We can bring something to this committee a little bit more tightened up and scheduled, but thank you. Which leads us to moving forward. We are ongoing scoring. Every application takes me anywhere between an hour and a half to three hours and that's if they do not have extra questions I have to reach out and ask.

So I've been doing that. We need to have a second committee meeting in the month of May in order for me to hit my timeline. So hopefully we can have another one of these and you can all meet again in a week or so. And then we have to have a public comment period June 1 through June 30 in order to meet the deadlines. And then it would go in front of city council for approval in July. Then it's my responsibility to draft up the action plan that we send to HUD that outlines every single project, all the goals, all the dollars we're allocating, and all the details. And then I have to submit that before August 15.

Yeah. So just to follow-up on that, if you could go back one slide, miss Rohr. That next meeting that would happen in a week or two, that would be us bringing you the scores. Right? Like, very transparently, here's how we graded it, here's how they graded, here's how much money we have, here's our recommendation.

Yeah. Sorry. Didn't say that.

So, it's really, hey, now you know before you see it at council, this is this is what it is. This is what we're recommending.

Yes. And the reason why the packets are printed is all of the applicants with a short description are listed there. So you can kinda see the application, the application quality we got this year. Okay. Are there any questions for me?

I just have a comment. Welcome to the city again. Cesar Guerrero was on this committee with Susanna and myself. Juan, I don't think you were on it at at the time. And, collectively, we talked about and this is before you came here. We wanted to reach out more to more organizations to get this spread out more. And and I think we accomplished that just by looking at the numbers. Yeah. So very

happy about much did. And, you know, what's what's really interesting about that too is so the county also gets these funds as well. We will get a lot of applicants that apply to the county and then they apply to us. This year, we were a week behind normally what we normally are. But we typically pair with the county and see what they're funding and then we can sometimes go, okay, you guys weren't able to fund them but they applied to us so we'll fund them.

And to be honest with you, I wanna say off the top of my head, out of all of the categories, I think like 80% were funded Joliet City non profits in the area. And if you, you know, my outreach to all of these were phone calls, emails. I got a ton that said, you know, Ivara reach out to us and you know so that was really awesome. But yeah, it's a tight knit community quite honestly So with a it was really great to get all that feedback and get everybody and talk to them all on

the phone and hear what their needs are in person as well. Can you do us a huge favor? Because when things don't go the way the public would like to see them go, they're coming to us with complaints. Jackie Lozado, I probably shouldn't say her name anymore, but she would come to counsel, like, starting in January Okay. And, like, give a presentation. Or was it January or February? She'd come really early. I almost feel like we have to poke the community and continue to poke because I found out about it personally with less than ten days left maybe. Yeah. And when the community gets mad about finding out about what's on these left, they're getting mad

at us. So I I didn't wanna interrupt.

So And I it was bad timing for you.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was good for the city of Joliet, but bad timing for you because it was, like, in the time that you came in. But moving forward for, like, next year Yeah. Can we just start it early and have it be done very publicly? So Yeah. Even if you didn't get the phone call or the email, you saw it on TV. And that would be great. If you can do that, we would be very appreciative.

Very much so. Yeah. That's no problem. And and I think also because of my past experience, I already know a lot of the nonprofits in the area. So I had, you know, even with me leaving in the transition that that was, I will say this, the major nonprofits, they all know. They all know it's grant season. And they reach out months before. But you're right. Some of the smaller nonprofits that need a little bit more help, they need to be nudged a little bit earlier. My goal through this program is to be reaching out to them and helping them year round, quite honestly.

Because a lot of them are lacking administrative knowledge in general and or they're duplicating efforts that another nonprofit is doing. And so one of my kind of personal goals is to make sure that if we can get two nonprofits to work together and then they're servicing more people, like that is more productive and more efficient. So let's work on that. So going community meetings is something I think is very important and I've been encouraged to do so. So that's how I see this moving on but I'm always open for suggestions and my email, I think all of you have my email.

I encourage you to reach out to me. I'm a resource for these funds or how to get these funds or I had somebody the other day call me and they're like, I know I don't qualify for CDBG funds, but I was interested in other federal dollars. What can I do? And I walked through that process with them. So yeah.

Very good. Very good. Do have any questions? Yeah. Thank you.

I know for the economic development one, I know so I thought it was only two sections, the public safety and the capital improvements. Did we always have an economic development one?

Or That's very interesting. Economic development is a category that is not always funded specifically. So it's kind of the best way to describe it is remember how I said public service has a 15% gap or a 50% cap? Mhmm. We can't fund over that.

Development is a weird niche where you can fund it and it pretty much is a public service, right? We're helping you reach out to people and help you help people. But they don't consider it a public service. So within the category. So it's been a way for us in the past because we know that our nonprofits love it's so competitive and they love spending in their So we've typically funded that so that it's kind of a little I don't wanna say a workaround, but it it Mhmm.

It's a public service, but it's not counted. This year, applications were so intense and honestly very well written and very well put together. I do think the extra workshops and all that really did help. So we're grading everything based on you're starting at zero and you're getting your points. So if the economic development applications score high, then I imagine that we would be funding that. That would be part of the staff recommendations but it's not necessarily guaranteed.

Okay. Thank you.

Are there any unused funds from previous years that

you can That's run great along question. Yes so for public service, if they're unused funds, they get rolled over to the next year as capital improvement. You can't But reuse if you have capital improvements, like if a project is canceled or, you know, we say you have done no movement, we're canceling this project, we do roll them over into the next year. So as we have allocated 924,000, a nonprofit may have come in under budget. In that case, we roll it into the next year's funds but you would see that in the staff recommendations. So you'll notice if we know that we have the extra funds, you'll notice that it won't add up to $9.24. It might add up to $9.62.

Do you have any other questions?

No. I I think it'd be appropriate to maybe set the date in a couple weeks. We can do that right now.

Can we do that?

You can. You can. And that's Then Lauren Lauren Helen will tell Lauren O'Hara.

I'm booked on

the twenty sixth. How about the you're gonna be gone? Yeah. Me. Yeah. For the week or what?

No. Just that day.

How about the twenty eighth? We'll just do it two weeks from now? Same time? Yeah. Yeah. They were serving

twenty eighth. Can you try and set that over there? Okay. At the same time, it would be good for me.

Yeah. Me too. I'm good.

Okay.

That makes me so happy because I I'm worried about my my deadlines.

I wanna say we could not have had anyone with more experience than you because I know of your works at the county, and I just can't think of anyone else we could add with more experience

than I really appreciate that. So thank passion of mine too. I just wanna throw that out there that I really so when you guys call me or when you email me, you're never bothering me. And I love being questioned because there's always very weird nuanced federal rules and guidelines and I geek out on it and I love it. And I look in the rules and and so I I encourage it.

Very cool. Thank you. Thank you.

You're welcome to the city.

Thank you. Is

there anything else? Is there anything you wanna address?

No. I'm good.

Do you have anything to address? No. Is there any public comment? Is there any public comment? Seeing that there is no public comment, can we get a motion to adjourn?

Motion to adjourn. Second.

All in favor, aye. They