Posted on 1 Comment

HUD Issues the FY ’12 Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) NOFA Not Long After the FY ’11 NOFA

HUD just issued the FY ’12 Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) NOFA (Notice of Funding Availability, which is HUD-speak for RFP). There’s about $61 million available for federally recognized Tribes, Alaskan Native Villages and selected Native American organizations. This is a great opportunity for eligible Native American applicants to fund housing, economic development and community facility projects, and maximum grants range from $600,000 to $5,500,000, depending on the location and number of persons impacted. The question is, why am I blogging about it, since it seems like another run-of-the-mill federal grant process?

The answer is in the timing of the NOFA release and deadline.

The timing issue caught my eye because the FY ’11 ICDBG deadline was June 15. The FY ’12 ICDBG NOFA was released on October 4 and the deadline is January 4, so two “annual” funding cycles will be completed within a year! Faithful readers will recall that I wrote several posts in halcyon days of the Stimulus Bill passing in early 2009, including February 2009’s Stimulus Bill Passes: Time for Fast and Furious Grant Writing. In it, I correctly predicted that the feds would have more than a little trouble shoveling $800 billion out of the door.

The Stimulus Bill also distorted the more or less predictable flow of other discretionary grant programs like ICDBG; while the Stimulus Bill unleashed a huge quantity of additional grant funds, there were few, if any, additional personnel to manage the process, as I observed then:

My experience with Federal employees is that they work slower, not faster, under pressure, and there is no incentive whatsoever for a GS-10 to burn the midnight oil. Federal staffers are just employees who likely don’t share the passion of the policy wonks in the West Wing or the grant applicants. They just do their jobs, and, since there are protected by Civil Service, they cannot be speeded up. Also, there are no bonuses in the Federal system for work above and beyond the call of duty.

The nearly back-to-back release of ICDBG NOFAs is likely the result of the Stimulus Bill backlog—something like the boa constrictor eating an elephant in Saint-Exupéry’s charming novella, The Little Prince. ICDBG-eligible applicants had to wait for the FY ’11 grants to be digested, and then they have the opportunity to apply all over again a few months later.

The lack of a federal budget for three years and the reliance on Continuing Resolutions (CRs) to fund federal agencies likely doesn’t help. While the media focuses on the upcoming election and never-ending economic challenges, Congress passes appropriation bills using CRs, which allows FY ’12 funds, like ICDBG, to become available. You can expect a flood of backlogged federal programs to issue RFPs in the next few months.

Given the chaos in the federal budgeting process, it seems like a good bet to apply for any grant programs that come along now because the funding cycles for ICDBG and lots of other programs are pretty screwed up. In the case of ICDBG, I have no idea when the FY ’13 ICDBG NOFA will appear, but there’s an opportunity for a second bite of the apple this year. It seems to me that any ICDBG-eligible entity should bite that apple (or is it a salmon? I leave it to readers to decide).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *