The City of Williamsport has reached a professional services agreement with a company to provide the Community and Economic Development department assistance on its use of HOME funding and ensuring standards are met with housing rehabilitation.

Austin Daily, city Housing Programs manager with the department, recently presented for City Council a request for the professional services agreement with Hailstone Economic for an amount not to exceed $30,000 for 2026.

The company would be assisting the city department during this upcoming year with spending down HOME funds, coming up with a prioritization matrix so that the city is able to move these funds more quickly and to set forth new policies and procedures that have not been updated in quite some time.

“We want to make sure we are keeping on top of our HOME program and policies as well as our housing rehabilitation standards,” Daily said.

Councilwoman Liz Miele, chair of the finance, weighed in on the discussion before a vote.

“When we discussed spending down HOME funds, are we talking about the amount of HOME funds the city has returned?” she asked.

“We had a pot of funding that, I think, was originally in the neighborhood of about $1 million in mortgage lending that had been paid back to the city and we were looking to once again spend down as part of a first-time homebuyers’ program,” she said. “Is that the funding that Hailstone will be assisting with?”

“Yeah, that would be our program income,” Daily said. “They would be assisting us in helping us spend that funding down, and including that in the prioritization,” he said.

“But we also have prior years’ funds that we’d like to get moving on,” Daily added.

As part of their agreement with the city, they would be working with the city department “to help set forth policies, so that we are not getting behind the expenditure of these funds, and that we are able to spend them down as we receive them,” he said.

That is because the federal government (Housing and Urban Development) does not want the city to receive funds and not spend them in that calendar year.

“The goal here is that we are able to move funds much more easily that we have in the past,” he said.

Miele then asked Daily what the total amount of funding was that was in the discussion of assisting the city in creating policies to spend more expeditiously.

“The program income is about $1 million,” he said.

Daily checked with Valerie Fessler, city executive director of Community and Economic Development, and said he believed the city also had six years of funding that the city previously had not spent.

Amounts differ from year-to-year, but the ballpark for each year would be about $200,000, he added.

“So we’re looking at about $2 million,” Miele said, adding that for the relatively low price of $30,000 the company will help the city to get that funding allocated, and to help the city to better allocate funding in the future.

“Yes,” Daily replied.

“That seems more than reasonable to me,” Miele said.

She also asked Daily if part of that arrangement will be to find a way the highest and best use for the $1 million in program income that is available.

“We would absolutely welcome any of the members of council who would like to meet with our department,” Daily said.

Miele said she would be interested in understanding more about what their proposals are, but also suggest that the city or suggest that the company officials reach out to local realtors.

“I know that there were a lot of realtors who seem to have strong feelings about ways in which we could best utilize that funding to encourage home ownership within the city,” she said.

Daily noted how this would help the department to expend the HOME funds available.

“Our staff is looking to do a housing-needs study moving forward and that would be separate from this,” he said. He said he thought the housing-needs study would be something more apt to engage realtors and developers in that regard, less so on the HOME funding expenditure.

Miele understood that but added that she thought since the city has used a lot of this funding as sort of a secondary lien on properties that the structuring of it might be “something we get a sense from the greater Williamsport community on what would be most useful in trying to get more people to become first-time homebuyers.”