The Gulfport City Council voted 4-3 to approve the city’s 2025 Annual Action Plan for HUD-funded CDBG and HOME programs, narrowly preserving more than $3.3 million in older, unspent federal allocations while creating funding “buckets” for housing repair, public facilities and other uses.

The vote followed more than an hour of council questioning and a string of public commenters who urged the council to name specific, address-level projects and prioritize low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. “There’s no clear commitment to addressing the urgent needs the community raised,” said Sonya Williams Barnes, a longtime Gulfport resident and organizer, during public comment.

Nut graf: The administration and the city’s HUD program staff argued the buckets approach was required by HUD and by environmental- and eligibility-review rules; naming specific projects now could force the city to withdraw funds if a project later proves ineligible. City staff said the approved plan preserves the city’s entitlement status and allows staff to pursue projects and procure partners that meet HUD rules. “What HUD considers a project is not typically what we would traditionally think about as a project,” said Nicole, a city community-development staff member. “HUD thinks about a project as these buckets of funding.”

Council members who opposed the plan repeated community demands for transparency and project-level commitments. Councilmember Holmes (identified in public remarks as “PJ”) said he favored denying preapproval of address-level projects, citing the need to honor neighborhood setback and land-use processes, but nonetheless supported the plan’s preservation of the entitlement funds. Councilmember Hines pressed for a workshop before finalizing allocations: “We do need a workshop,” she said, arguing that the city had repeatedly failed to spend prior allocations and that neighborhood projects should be clearly documented before HUD submission.

Administration staff described a technical and legal constraint: HUD requires action plans to list categories and funding allocations (for example, housing rehabilitation, public services, public facilities) rather than pre-committed, address-level projects when environmental review and eligibility have not been completed. Staff said HUD had recently allowed the city to retain prior-year funds that had been at risk and that a missed deadline could endanger that recovery. “If no action is taken, there’s only one council session between now and the 16th,” Nicole said, noting HUD’s statutory deadline for submission.

Councilmembers said they will seek workshop(s) and follow-up briefings about how the administration will convert the approved buckets into project solicitations, request-for-proposals (RFPs) and address-level commitments that comply with HUD timeliness, environmental review and national-objective rules. The council also asked staff to circulate a plain-language explanation of how the buckets will be translated into projects and how residents may submit or nominate proposals.

Ending: The approved action plan keeps Gulfport eligible for federal CDBG and HOME funding for FY 2025 while setting in motion a procurement and public-comment process to identify address-level work. Council members said they expect further public meetings and formal council approvals before funds are committed to specific projects.

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