St. Vincent de Paul, Family Promise, Lake City Center to benefit

The city of Coeur d’Alene expanded its reach to help lower-income citizens navigate the health crisis Tuesday night, voting to set up allocation for almost $200,000 in federal funds toward combating the coronavirus.

By adding the $199,675 to the city’s block grant action plan, the City Council devoted resources to at least three local organizations that work with low-to-moderate income and homeless residents.

The funds — courtesy of the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion federal stimulus package passed in late March in response to COVID-19’s devastating effects on the economy — must go to those vulnerable populations, as dictated by block grant requirements issued from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The first three recipients to receive the funds are St. Vincent de Paul, Family Promise and the Lake City Center.

St. Vincent’s will receive $24,000 to be split between emergency shelter costs and hard shelter costs, Family Promise will receive up to $12,600 to help provide temporary housing for homeless families for the next seven months, and the Lake City Center will receive $3,686 to go toward trays for its expanded Meals On Wheels program.

Twelve organizations have filed requests for the block grant funding. St. Vincent’s, Family Promise and the Lake City Center had their requests expedited, as they were providing services deemed most urgent.

With the nearly $200,000 infusion, the Community Development Block Grant purse has now swelled to $529,490.

Grants can be issued to businesses at risk of cutting lower-income employees due to the virus, a cause that caught Council member Woody McEvers’ eye.

“With all the eligibility projects for this COVID-19 thing,” McEvers noted, “… obviously, they’re good. There’s one of them here in the middle — assistance to business — that would be really beneficial to a lot of the smaller businesses here.

“It would be real neat to be able to do something like that for the little independents, because they kind of get left out of these big things where people are helping a lot of people.”