City Council - public_hearing

Council member Tierra Ross and I am calling the council affordable housing bond hearing to order. Thank you all for being here, particularly to Director Stevens and team from our city's Department of Development. Thank you to all of you who showed up this evening for our hearing. To those of you who are tuning in live on our YouTube channel, thank you for tuning in and thank you to Council President Hardin for being here with me today. In November, Columbus voters overwhelmingly approved a historic $500 million in affordable housing bonds, the largest local housing investment in our city's his

No, thank you, Chair Ross. I think where I would pick up is that, and thank you again to the administration, and thank you for the community that is here, both the housing advocates, but those who live in housing, which is all of us, are those who advocate for folks who need housing. So thank you all for being here and being part of this conversation. As Chair Ross indicated, the $500 million bond approval that the voters gave to us represents trust, 500 million points of trust, and that trust comes with a responsibility to make sure that these funds are invested carefully, that they're invest

Thank you. With that, I will turn it over to the Department of Development. Presumed Director Stevens is going to kick us off here.

Thank you, Director Stephens, Deputy Director Prosser, Deputy Director Jones. I'm going to kick it to President Hardin to start our question and answer period. And then once we do that, we will get our community speakers up.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you to the department for the presentation today. And thank you for the report that you presented to our offices earlier this month. Can we start at the bond questions? For folks who When we say that the citizens of Columbus gave us $500 million to invest in affordable housing, what they said is that we could take out a loan for $500 million and that they would back it if it would ever fall through if we were not able to pay it back with the money that we set aside. So what I am trying to understand, and for clarity for the public, for projects that are in the

Thank you, Madam Auditor. The reason I'm just asking this question, it kind of goes to the larger... We are, as a city, dealing with less resources to do a lot more things that we have to do over the next several years, which means that we will all be hearing a word that sounds good always, but it does mean less, prioritization. And if there's going to be prioritization in terms of housing and housing projects... It then leads us to the transparency question. How are we choosing which projects go? When are those projects going? How do folks apply and how do we score and measure next to one ano

thank you thank you earlier on just really quickly a point of clarification auditor Lewis when you say there's a certain amount of bond sales that the city city is prepared to sell at the end of the year that is not just affordable housing bond sales can you just clarify what what that means comprehensively absolutely thank you thank you councilmember Ross so

So once we understand what the city's capacity is from a bond sale perspective, it would be somewhere within that capacity that we could potentially include bond sales to go specifically toward affordable housing. That's correct.

You were reading my mind, so my next question was going to be, what dollars are we spending right now? And these, according to your statement, are dollars that were legislated and approved in 2024 from which sale?

Director, and this is probably for Director Prosser. My last question for right now is just around the transparency portal that council worked with the administration by code to set up. Just the timing on when that will be. It's the online transparency portal that we worked with you to get set up.

You talked a little bit about kind of the engagement that you go through before determining what your investment strategies are going to be or where you determine the need is from an affordable housing perspective. Can you give me some insight on that engagement? I will tell you just as a layperson before I got up here, I would see various community meetings that were being held by the Department of Finance or just not necessarily... super intuitive for someone in our community to be able to understand how to tap into some of these conversations around housing. So can you talk a little bit abo

Are you prepared to help us understand what your engagement plan is for coming year i know in the report you mentioned maybe using the feedback in in quarter three and quarter four to determine what the investment strategy is going to look like so what does quarter one and quarter two look like from an engagement perspective and how can residents be sure to know when when their opportunity is to provide feedback to the department certainly and i think that is chair ross a really important part of how as we expand to the 500 million we have again this opportunity to be expansive in in the prior

In June of 26, I know you guys issued a notice of funding availability to the community. Maybe it was different from past years or was this the same process? Yes.

So do you anticipate... I have a few questions with regard to this. First, do you anticipate that folks who don't receive funding awards from the state are still going to have the capacity to fulfill a project just with city dollars, And if not, do we anticipate having to make up those dollars, or is there new funding criteria, scoring criteria that we are using now that we weren't using before? And if there is new criteria, I would like to know what that criteria is.

I have a question around the preservation strategy. So I know a number of our programs are kind of couched within that preservation strategy to include emergency home repair, critical home repair. What's the third one? Just home repair, right? Emergency, critical, and what else?

Roof, thank you. Some of these requirements are different. So I know that emergency home repair, I think, is up to 50% AMI. And then when you get into critical and the other tranche of home repair, it is up to 80% AMI. Have we thought about streamlining those requirements? Are they based on federal designations that we have to use when we move into more of this city-led application process with more of these city dollars that are not necessarily tied to the state? Have we considered what it looks like to maybe streamline this so that we can meet the need?

A question around just how do we determine $500 million in affordable housing bond dollars were necessary and needed? Because it sounds like we're still kind of building criteria around how to access that. We're still very much in the building phase. Was there a thing that led us to believe that $500 million was what we needed, even though we don't necessarily have a plan for how we're going to use it?

Did we, so I have a question. In the innovation bucket, you mentioned financing early stage capital. Are we talking pre-development here? Are we talking something else? And tell me what you envision this looking like.

And I would presume that that is a very critical, innovative tool that would allow for us to broaden accessibility to $2 for our emerging developers, for those developers. Thank you. Okay, I know we have speakers, so I don't want to ask.

No, I just think the larger point specifically to even the $57 million that Director Stevens spoke of that is in the capital or in the bond sale that is before council now is What is becoming clear to me is we're going to have to have another public hearing on this once we figure out what the true capacity is so that we can, because right now we're talking about nebulous projects and nebulous, like we're talking, because I don't believe that there is nearly, I don't, I think that we should see what we're actually talking about and what's before us, what projects, so we can be very specific wit

I was not insinuating that you were hiding something. I was insinuating that until we even know what we are going to let out for sale, then we don't know what projects we are talking about. Thus, we can't say how we're scoring against another to prioritizing. That's it.

I think so. And that was literally my final question. I know that. Part of the legislation requires council to adopt a resolution to talk about what our priorities are going to be with our bond dollars, with the housing project dollars. I don't know that we're necessarily ready to do that now, but I think that as we receive more information regarding our capacity as a city, regarding how much money we would be able to contribute toward affordable housing, then we would have those details to be able to include in that resolution. And I would just ask for your partnership as we come back to the

Welcome to Council, Amanda. Or welcome back. I don't know how many times you've been here before.

Thank you, Amanda. Next, I am going to call, it's Brian, last name, is it Coltis? Coltis. Coltis. Brian Coltis from Transit Columbus. Welcome to council.

Thank you, Brian. Will, I'm so sorry. Thank you, Will.

And I would just say that I think that one of the hopes that I would have maybe as an individual council member is that the innovation fund that is set aside for bond dollars would explore ways to create like a revolving loan fund because we do believe in reinvestment and we do think that the residents deserve to get paid back for their investment in these projects, and by paid back, I mean more housing built, and so certainly not, we are looking into those, I would say that.

Actually, we wanted to, because we've talked a little bit about this, and I know the report mentions this, so if you could just broadly talk kind of about ideas around this equity model, what that would look like, what our capacity is to do that, and how does it solve comprehensively, or could it solve comprehensively the need?

OK. Thank you, Director Prosser. Carly Booz from the Affordable Housing Alliance. Welcome back to Council, Carly.

And our last speaker is Johnny Pitts from Dayspring Christian Community Development Corporation. Johnny, are you here? No? I have a note that he may not make it. OK. That is it. We are done with speakers. Hey, guys, this is my first hearing. Thank you, all of you, particularly to the Department of Development for coming and kind of explaining where we were as a city. I think we are, one, very clear that you all understand the complexities of housing and the layered approach and the diversity approach that is necessary to be able to solve

You were right. I was trying to land this plane.

The people are probably hungry, all kinds of things. Yes, Director Stevens, let me turn it over to you a little bit to talk about Ordinance Number 2326-2026 and the renaming of the Division of Housing.

Awesome. I think for us, the importance is the continued work together because I think we oftentimes talk a lot about housing stability in a silo and we know that all of it has to work together, right? When you think about economic development, you think about jobs, you think about all of those things, they are helping to uplift our residents so that this community becomes more affordable so that folks have the opportunity to thrive where they need to thrive. And understanding where you need housing, where you need jobs, all of those things have to be looked at as one. So I would just encourag

Well, one, congratulations on your first hearing on a difficult but very important topic. I, too, want to join you in thanking the department. What was very clear today is the department has worked a great understanding of the scope of the problem, the magnitude, and has ideas on how to move it forward. What I will continue to, I'm trying to be very clear about what my goal is, is to encourage and work with the administration around transparency on how we operate these programs. And especially as we have limited resources going forward, how we make the decisions about how we deploy when we hav

As always, thank you to my team. Thank you to Council President Hardin's team. Thank you to Auditor Lewis, all of the folks that are helping to make these public hearings possible. We appreciate you all. And with that, we will adjourn or conclude our first affordable housing bond hearing.