Colonia grant criteria too much for county

Ector County Commissioners were looking to get feedback in the “colonia areas” of West Odessa to help improve those areas, but they decided a recent grant’s criteria was just too much for the amount of money it was offering.

Approximately 400,000 people in Texas live in the poor-to-nonexistent infrastructure areas of colonias, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office, the most in any state in the U.S. How many of them live in colonias in Ector County isn’t known, and is something that would have been part of the study.

Originally applying for $300,000, the Texas Department of Agriculture offered the county $90,000 to help study, survey and plan for future services in portions of Precincts 1 and 4, represented by commissioners Freddie Gardners’ and Armando Rodriguez, respectively.

But during Tuesday’s commissioners’ court meeting, Landgraf, Crutcher & Associates Inc., engineer John Landgraf’s informed commissioners that the requirements set by the state were too great for the amount of time they had to complete the paperwork for the grant.

The court voted unanimously against pursuing the grant.

According to the Texas Attorney General’s website, most colonias have people living without basic services such as water and sewage services, electricity, health facilities, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing.

“The development of Texas colonias dates back to at least the 1950s,” the Texas Secretary of State’s website states. “Using agriculturally worthless land, land that lay in floodplains or other rural properties, developers created unincorporated subdivisions. They divided the land into small lots, put in little or no infrastructure, then sold them to low-income individuals seeking affordable housing.”

Gardner said one of the main reasons commissioners voted the way they did was the time. When the grant became available months ago, the county applied for it in hopes of obtaining the money, Gardner said. However, the state did not get back to the commissioners until recently and there would not have been enough time for the county to meet the requirements needed to obtain the money.

To meet the deadline, the county looked at hiring more workers to help speed up the process. Gardner said that in order to qualify for the money, 80 percent of the population had to participate and 51 percent of those who did participate had to be below the poverty line —$22,350 total yearly income for a family of four. Whatever money spent by the county would be reimbursed by the grant, but Gardner said the $90,000 would not be enough to cover the extra workers.

“It was just a physical impossibility,” Gardner said. “And (the money) wouldn’t go as far as we would need it to.”

Calls made to the Texas Department of Agriculture for details about the grant were not returned.

County Judge Susan Redford said should the money have been awarded to the county, it would have been used to find out what services, such as water and electricity, were needed to help the residents in those areas. Though the grant was not successful, Gardner said the county was still looking at other options.

“There will be more grants available,” Gardner said.

@OAgovernment