How Would You Use $22.5 Million To Address Poverty In Buffalo?
Every year cities across the country receive grant dollars from HUD to address poverty. Buffalo will be receiving about $22.5 million this year. The Mayor has submitted his proposed Community Development Block Grant Budget to the Common Council. A copy of the communication from the Mayor, an executive summary and the budget is attached. When I printed and scanned the budget I had to do a lot of fixing, so this is not an exact copy and typing errors may still exist.
The question is, what would you do with $22.5 million to address poverty and economic development in Buffalo?
BuffaloGeek and I came up with some ideas, shown on my site. I can't seem to pop the link in here, though.
http://buffalopundit.wnymedia.net/blogs/archives/6169
Posted by: Buffalopundit | January 24, 2008 at 11:45 AM
The block grants seem to be so far spread out there seems to be nothing of substance. 30k here, 100k there, 60k here, too bad the money isn't focused in one area...hum what a novel idea...wonder where I got that from.
Also, do we really have to devote that much of the CDBG to administrative costs? Over millions of dollars to distribute these funds? Seems like too much to me.
Posted by: Jay | January 24, 2008 at 02:52 PM
How would I fight poverty? Well I would hire more social workers and I would get the police out of the local donut and coffee store and get them to actually ring the doorbells of truant kids, Id put truant kids into the legal system with a social worker assigned to truant, failing and misbehaving kid then as a last resort I would remove the kids from the parents home and then ban the parents from municipal, county, state or federal services.
No school....no social services!
Then I would offer small community grants to block clubs to do things like fix windows, paint a house, plant a garden, fix gutters, patch roofs, etc...things that actually improve a community.
Then I would demand schools be open as community centers until 7PM and then declare a 9PM school night curfew.
If your college age then you would be banned from receiving social services...your choice would be either work or school to which I would
If your older then there need to be funds for job retraining, funds for a business review panel of local college experts to foster and facilitate entrepreneurial activities.
The only solution always comes back to education or business financing no matter how old someone is...but in reality what Buffalo needs are statistics for blue collar job creation so that we know what kind of low skill jobs are being created and we can direct people there.
Posted by: Thomas | January 24, 2008 at 11:03 PM