The State of New York recently released the list of grantees from the most recent round of Consolidated Funding Applications for economic development, public facilities, environmental protection, parks development, and Main Street redevelopment. The list is worth scanning if only to explore the creative ways that these funding programs are being used, and brainstorm about how these concepts might inspire new ways to pay for improvements to other sectors, such as the affordable rental housing industry.
A quick scan of the statewide list pretty clearly shows some priority goals for the State. One of the clear outcomes of this list is to reduce the number of buildings that are heated by fossil fuels. In award after award, the project funding will be used to replace natural gas or oil-fired heating systems with electric-powered geothermal heating, improving heating efficiency, and making it possible to power the system with a solar array on the roof. This model is clearly applicable to existing larger multifamily rental housing complexes, particularly in rural areas. Projects financed with the Rural Development 515 program often have larger sites than the footprint of the building. That excess land often used simply as a lawn that must be maintained, is an ideal location for a well field that will make geothermal heating feasible. Any project that has a large parking lot also has the potential for geothermal heating. Adaptive re-use of a historic hotel building in Kingston was developed with a modest parking lot adjacent to the building. A well field for the geothermal heating system was installed under the parking lot in a downtown neighborhood. In this case, the parking lot was then repaved with permeable brick pavers, providing some control of stormwater runoff from the site, as well as recharging the aquifer. Coupled with a large solar array on the roof, these projects can achieve much greater energy efficiency. Many of the grant awards of this type were funded by NYSERDA.
The CFA awards were also notable for the number of projects that received multiple funding awards from similar programs, particularly through the Empire State Development Corporation. When tallied up, these multiple grants raised millions for some of the projects. Often these projects were for business attraction or expansion, and these projects are often very expensive. The lesson to be learned here is that it sometimes is worth exploring whether a portion of your project may qualify for funding from a CFA program that you may not have considered previously to fund a portion of your project costs, such as breaking out the heating system costs as described above, to allow those costs to be allocated to a funder such as NYSERDA. This could position your project to secure additional points in the primary application review for leveraging outside funding, or to secure funding above and beyond the program funding limits.
So, this is a shout-out to our friends in the RPC community to take a renewed look at the CFA funding round in the future as a potential source of financing that can make your project feasible during the development phase, and reduce operating costs in the out years. And don’t be shy about adopting the buzz words used in the project descriptions. There are obvious common themes and phrases that are found among the winning proposals.
The award list can be found at https://www.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021-11/ESDBatchAwardedProjects.pdf
The Curmudgeon