Carli and Evan are joined today by Jessica Sanders, Nevada's program administrator for the Community Development Block Grant. In today's episode, Jessica discusses how CDBG builds prosperity and enhances the quality of life in rural Nevada.
[Intro]
Welcome! You're listening to Diversify Nevada, a podcast produced by the Governor's Office of Economic Development. Diversify Nevada provides insightful discussions and expert analysis on the driving forces behind our state's economic, workforce and community development. I'm Tom Burns, the executive director of the Governor's Office of Economic Development.
[Speaker 1]
We're your hosts, Carli Smith and Evan Haddad. Today's guest is Jessica Sanders, the state of Nevada's program administrator for the Community Development Block Grant, more commonly known as CDBG. Over her 21-year career, Jessica has also worked at the Nevada Railroad Museum and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, where she worked with the Division of Natural Heritage and state lands question one program. In 2015, Jessica started at GOED as the Community Development Block Grant Program Specialist. She was promoted in 2020 to the position of CDBG program administrator, where she takes great pride in providing exceptional service to communities in Nevada. We're looking forward to talking with Jessica today about her career and work and how it impacts rural Nevada. Jessica Sanders, welcome to the show.
[Speaker 2]
Welcome. Thank you. So let's start from the beginning, because a 21 year run in State service and counting is very impressive for our listeners. Tell us about your story, and that aha moment when you realize, yep, CDBG is my place, and decided to stick around and grow your professional career here at GOED.
[Speaker 3]
Thank you, Carli and Evan, so I first started with the Question One program, which is the conservation bond, and then later called the Question One program, and that really is where I learned to manage grants and where I found my love for it. So I was then offered the position at GOED. And when the position became available, I was kind of like, oh my gosh, this sounds really interesting, something that was kind of up the alley that I was wanting to pursue in my career, and I was really tasked with doing some great work. I love construction work, and I love doing payrolls, which is really odd.
And everyone thinks that's just the funniest thing. And so in my position as the program specialist, that is a lot of what I've done. And and then Jean Barrett, who is my predecessor, decided to retire, which I was very sad about, but she was a great mentor. And I just, I love the program. I love what we do for our rural communities in Nevada. And so that's kind of why I've stayed with GOED so long. And honestly, CDBG is always changing.
[Speaker 1]
So let's dive into your role a little bit more. You're the program administrator for community development block grant, which we'll call CDBG. That's how we call it, yeah. Give us an idea of what CDBG is, and kind of the work it does for the rural areas and kind of what it encompasses.
[Speaker 3]
So CDBG is, as you said, the Community Development Block Grant. We grant funds to small rural communities. The rural communities are 50,000 or less in cities and 200,000 or less in counties. And we have 26 eligible communities in Nevada that can actually apply to CDBG.
A lot that's like all of Nevada, right?
You know, you have those bigger ones, those urban ones that are like Clark County, Henderson, those ones, they receive HUD funding directly from HUD. And so they can, they can use their funding in different ways. We have a competitive process that we go through every year. So every March, April, depending on when Congress passes our budget, we do an advisory committee, and they vote and recommend all of our grants to people, but our priorities are really to do infrastructure in rural Nevada. So we're looking at water, sewer lines, ADA compliant projects. Those are the type of projects. Those are the really big projects that these communities don't have the funding for. The one great thing that I always love about CDBG is that we can match other federal funds, which you don't see that a lot, right? So that's wonderful, and we don't have a match requirement, we do like to see that there's buy in from the communities that buy in would be like they're doing their in kind match. So they're they're managing the grants. So that really kind of is CDBG a little bit of a nutshell.
[Speaker 2]
I think that was fantastic answer from your perspective. What are some of the biggest challenges that rural Nevada faces. How does CDBG try to solve those?
[Speaker 3]
I think one of the biggest challenges is applying and managing federal grants that it's huge in rural Nevada, because you have these really tiny communities that they have their administrative assistant really is the one that's managing the grant. Right? And a lot of federal grants don't give training on how to manage the federal grant. So our team, myself and Sarah Clark, go out to our communities and we train them on how to apply for CDBG and how to manage CDBG. And when you're there, there are different nuances to managing CDBG, but pretty much, we're training you on how to manage just a federal grant in general, because we're a lot of them are crossovers. There are some things that CBG does that is a little bit different than regular federal federal grants, but I think that's one of the biggest challenges. Is our smaller communities being able to apply and being able to manage those grants.
[Speaker 1]
When you talk about training people to manage the grants, what does that look like in a little more like detail, like, What are you teaching them to do? And, like, what kind of skills are you helping them develop to handle those grants?
[Speaker 3]
We tell them how to set up their grant, their file system, how to manage procurement is a huge one, and then how to do like Davis Bacon construction grants. Infrastructure is a lot of construction grants. And so that is a huge part of CDBG is managing those construction grants and showing our grantees how to manage them, where you have to go to get the information, what the information you are doing, how to check the payrolls for construction grants. That is a lot of what we're training on, how to close out our grants specifically. And then environmental reviews, which all of our grantees love, but you have to have an environmental review for any CDBG grant. So we train them on how to do the environmental review, how to submit the environmental review, and that type of stuff.
[Speaker 1]
Talk about a time where you looked at the results of the work you're doing for CDBG, and thought, Wow. You know, this is really having an impact. You can really see it happening. You can see the change in the communities. What sticks out in your mind.
[Speaker 3]
So that is really hard, because all of the projects really stick out in my mind. I've seen a lot. Done a lot, yeah, and they're, they're great projects. I mean, we have the West Windover Fire, fire station, which we, we've done a press release on that.
It is really nice. A gorgeous building. We were able to go to the ribbon cutting on that. And it was amazing to see when the community comes out and support these, these grants. But we were, like, this little, tiny piece of this $13 million project. We were $500,000 of it. So that, to me, is like, wow, this is an amazing impact that we have on the city of Fernley. They have the community response center that we helped with that, again, huge project, and we were a little part of it. And now they have the Boys and Girls Club in there, and they're looking at putting more stuff in there, and there's a campus that's going in there.
[Speaker 2]
I was a Boys and Girls Club kid, really, yes, I was. I think that's a lot of the reason why I am who I am today is because of that organization.
[Speaker 3]
Wow, yeah, it's an amazing organization. So to see that, and if there's ever another crisis in that community, this is where the the citizens are going to go. So again, we were able to go to the opening of that one, and it was a huge seeing the community come out and support Esmeralda County. They did not have a 911 system, and so when people would call for a 911 they would be directed to Mineral County. And then the ambulances weren't going to the right places. So we were able to get a 911, system out there, so huge for that community. And those are a little bit of the types. I mean, the city of Ely has clay and wood pipes. And, yeah, we're helping them to do new sewer and water lines throughout. And we were actually able to see the pipes. They're pretty amazing, the wood pipes. We were actually able to go out to ELINK and see one of the pipes. So how big were they? They were huge. We wanted to bring one back. We were like, oh, maybe we can put one in the back of the car and bring it back to show people. And they were just way too big. We didn't realize how big they were. So those are just some of the impactful projects that we are doing in rural Nevada. And there's many, many more that I'm, I'm, I would probably take up all my time discussing all of those projects, but there's so many. And that's I mean, those, those are, that's why I do, what I do is because you see those projects.
[Speaker 2]
Well, and I think you kind of take those kind of things for granted. You know, you call 911, you know you're gonna get an answer in some of these places you don't, or it takes a long time to get a response, and it's very impactful. So what are some aspects of CDBG that people might not know about or misunderstand?
[Speaker 3]
I think that we kind of talked about that a little bit. It's really not understanding that we can help with other federal grants, that we can be that matching for other federal grants, that we don't have a match requirement, we just like to see buy in. And I also think that there is a misconception that we are similar to the entitlement CDBG program, which is those bigger urban areas, and we're not so we can do things just a little bit different than those areas can do. And I think that that really is kind of that misconception that people say, Well, we we did this before, and things have changed, and priorities have changed, and so just because CDBG has 20 we I think we have 26 eligible activities, the state can narrow those down to what we feel are our priorities, which is really infrastructure in our communities, those water and sewer lines and ADA compliant projects.
[Speaker 1]
So did you call it eligible activity activities? What are those Exactly?
[Speaker 3]
So those are the activities that they can put their project in. We have planning. And that's the other thing is we do planning. So we work with USDA and NDP a lot on those bigger projects where they can do some of them. We can do the preliminary engineering reports. We can do those really big environmental assessments, those would be considered a planning grant for us. And that's just kind of the start of those bigger projects. And so I don't know that people understand that we can help with that type of stuff.
[Speaker 1]
What are some projects that are on the horizon for 2026?
[Speaker 3]
So we have, we do have quite a few. We just finished our eligibility in October. Our eligible grantees have to go for eligibility. They put in their eligibility and were moved forward to application. We had 14 move forward to application, and of those, there's a lot of water and sewer project, Ada projects, yeah, we're also doing some work on a community center, a historic community center in Esmeralda County. That's one of the applications that are coming through. So there's a lot coming through. We get about $2.9 million and when I was just calculating it out there's $5.2 million in requests. It's very competitive for Nevada.
[Speaker 1]
Curious how, since you've been here and you've been doing this for such a long time, have you noticed like, a change in the type of most common requests, like the things that communities are asking for? Have those needs changed at all since you've been here? Have you seen anything different in the last couple of years compared to being because you mentioned Ada and I imagine, like, that's a big one, because there, there's, like, there's new, like, federal regulations, I think, right, like in the last decade or so,
[Speaker 3]
Yeah, I mean, most of the ADA compliant projects are for sidewalks and that type of stuff. Fallon does a great job. They have been doing ADA compliant sidewalks throughout their area to make it more accessible for people to get downtown and to help with those businesses. I haven't really seen a lot of change because we've always really prioritized infrastructure. We did do a lot of public service grants when I first started, but then there's other funding out there for public service there's a lot of other funding out there for public service grants. So that's why we chose to do more of infrastructure. We also do a five year Consolidated Plan, and that goes out to the public, and they really look at our priorities, and they're the ones that set the priorities. Is when we Yeah, they do a survey, they say, this is what we really want to see within Nevada and infrastructure has really been that priority for us for the last 10 years. We just finished our consolidated plan, and again, that's what they did as a priority.
[Speaker 1]
That's kind of cool. You asked for the for feedback, and you do those survey processes. I didn't know that.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah, no, they are very intricate with what they do and kind of the processes of how they do it. So is there anything that you want to mention about CDBG that we may have not asked a question about?
[Speaker 3]
We do, like I said in the beginning, we do like to do a lot of trainings. So that is one of the big thing. And this year, we're really hoping to kind of do a little bit different training than we normally do, and bring in some other funders to kind of talk to our grantees and tell them what other funding sources are out there. Because I think that is huge when you're looking at a program like ours, where we can match other federal funders to know what's out there and what we can help with. So that's kind of what our goal is for the next couple of months is really looking at those other funders and making sure we get them to the table to talk with our grantees and understand what their priorities are and how our grantees can fit within their their programs.
[Speaker 2]
I think even just that, being able, like, if you're a small community, you have one person, like you said, an admin assistant, having that training or extra person as a sounding board makes all the difference. So what is your work at? Go at that motivates and excites you the most.
[Speaker 3]
Seeing the projects completed. I think that is the biggest thing, being able to go to these openings of a project. It's really hard to go to an opening of a sewer line
But it's still, I mean, we know, for us that these projects are getting done, and they're they're providing clean water to our citizens in rural Nevada. And I think, to me, that's a huge benefit. And seeing some of the the West Windover project at the fire station is huge, if there's ever, you know, a need for that to be also be a Community Response Center, the Fernley project. We have one in Caliente. They're just really these projects. They warm my heart, and that's what I love about the program.
[Speaker 1]
Fantastic answer. Well. Jessica Sanders, thank you so much for joining us.
[Outro]
And that's all for this episode of Diversify Nevada. This podcast was created by the Governor's Office of Economic Development, with the help of our sound editor Michelle Rebaleati . If you'd like to learn more about our agency, you can visit our website@goed.nv.gov, and if you'd like to share feedback about the show or suggest a topic you'd like us to cover, send us an email to goed@goed.nv.gov.
Thanks for joining us, and we'll be back soon.