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ECDA: Harbor House $2M grant demands extensive Davis-Bacon compliance and extra staff time
Summary
ECDA staff told the Dec. 1 Community Development Committee that administering a $2,000,000 Harbor House grant requires substantial additional administrative work to meet Davis-Bacon and Section 3 requirements; the bid process timeline will likely push city-managed portions of the project into February.
KANKAKEE — ECDA staff warned the Community Development Committee on Dec. 1 that overseeing a $2,000,000 Harbor House construction grant is more administratively demanding than originally anticipated because of federal wage and procurement rules.
Barbara Brewer Watson, introduced in the transcript as the ECDA executive director, said the state returned edits to the grant’s bid documents. She described the bid as substantial — "the bid document is 38 pages long" — and said the grant requires Davis-Bacon Act and Section 3 compliance. She told the committee the state must lock in the wage requirement (a roughly three-week procedure) before the city’s bid package can be released and, per grant rules, the bid then must be advertised for about 30 days. Taken together, those steps make it likely that the city’s portion of the project will not reach procurement until February.
Staff described several time-consuming administrative requirements: specialized payroll and reporting for Davis-Bacon compliance, additional marketing and notice to demonstrate local hiring efforts and "best efforts" under Section 3, and other documentation tasks the team has not previously needed for normal progress reports. "This is a lot of heavy administration work," Brewer Watson told the committee. She added that ECDA and state grant representatives are "all learning together," and that the process required more staff hours than originally estimated.
When asked whether the city sought reimbursement for administrative hours, ECDA staff said the grant application was structured to direct funds toward construction rather than administrative overhead; consequently ECDA is not charging significant administrative staff time to the grant and is absorbing large portions of that work internally. The committee discussed the strain on staff time and possible local fundraising by Harbor House; ECDA said local donors are supporting Harbor House’s capital campaign but staff did not have a full list of municipal contributions.
ECDA said legal staff reviewed the bid document and edits were under way; once the state completes the wage lock and the bid is advertised for the required period, ECDA expects to move forward with procurement and then transition to routine monitoring and progress reporting once construction begins.
What’s next: ECDA will circulate the revised bid documents and return to the committee with updates on procurement timing and any requests related to staffing or support.
