Senate committee presses commissioner after House strips three specific housing projects from capital bill

The Senate Institutions Committee heard from Alex Grove, commissioner of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, on a package of capital appropriations the governor had recommended for three specific housing projects after the House removed the named projects from the capital bill and cut the recommendation from $3.1 million to $2 million.

Committee members said the projects are shovel-ready and asked why the House moved project-specific funding out of the capital bill. The question touched on process and transparency: committee members said the House appeared uncomfortable funding housing through the capital bill and preferred broader grant programs rather than direct appropriations to named municipal projects.

"This funding was moved out of the capital bill by the house, moved into the big bill, reduced from 3.1 down to 2," Grove told the committee. He said the administration had a process that reviewed about 17 candidate projects, and that the three selected had been identified through an internal review with the Agency of Administration. Grove said naming the municipal projects in the appropriation was intended to be more transparent and to speed distribution: "we just thought we actually felt it was more transparent to just name the municipalities the projects right in the appropriate. Say, this is where it's going." He added that the agency would continue to execute grant agreements with municipalities and oversee compliance.

Committee members pressed on readiness and prioritization. Grove said one project—referred to in the hearing as Penn High—was essentially ready to start and would struggle without a full allocation, while the other two were "shovel ready" but not scheduled to begin immediately. He cautioned that starting a new statewide grant program now would require backward engineering the process used to surface these three projects and might prompt criticism that projects were predetermined: "If we're gonna end up drawing up a new grant program based on the process that we went through ... then I think we're actually gonna ... have people screaming and saying, well, you've predetermined this."

Several senators urged restoring the full amount or otherwise finding a way to fund all three projects. One committee member said the projects included nonstandard housing approaches that the state should support; another said that losing the funding would delay housing the state needs. Grove said he needed to consult legal counsel and agency staff to confirm what the agency could administer within statutory and administrative requirements should the Senate decide to restore funding or change the appropriation language.

The committee directed staff to continue work on the capital bill language and coordination with the Agency of Commerce and Community Development so senators could decide whether to reinstate project-specific appropriations or to rework the mechanism for distributing the $2 million appropriation.

The hearing did not include a formal vote on any appropriation; committee members asked for follow-up information about project readiness, the agency's authority to administer a direct appropriation versus a grant program, and the specific cost pressures on the project identified as most time-sensitive.