PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — The Aroostook Band of Micmacs and the Houlton Band of Maliseets will benefit from a USDA Rural Development grant that will address housing needs.
USDA Rural Development State Director Virginia Manuel said the grant, which is made available through the Rural Community Development Initiative (RCDI) program, “will make a difference in the lives of some of Maine’s most remote senior residents through helping to ensure that they have access to quality housing that is safe, energy-efficient, and affordable.”
The Genesis Community Loan Fund will utilize grant monies in the amount of $249,900 to provide training and technical assistance to the Houlton Band of Maliseets, Aroostook Band of Micmacs, and Penobscot tribes, as well as Southern Harbor Eldercare Services on North Haven Island, and Island Commons on Chebeague Island to address critical senior housing needs.
Technical assistance and training will be offered to the tribes in addressing largely their elder — or senior — housing needs. “Ultimately that will be repairing existing properties that Native Americans in both those tribes may be living in or building new properties,” said Manuel.
Staff will also train and educate the tribes to secure resources for adopting a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) process for land conveyance that will result in new opportunities for affordable home ownership on tribal land.
“It’s all about helping aging tribal members and/or Mainers age in place in their existing homes or building new ones, or the conveyance of a home on tribal land because a tribal member doesn’t own his or her own land; the tribe does or it’s in trust, so accessing financing to purchase a home or to construct a home by a tribal member can be challenging,” Manuel said.
Craig Sanborn, director of the Micmac Housing Department in Presque Isle, said the tribe is still talking with the Genesis organization to determine how the tribe “will be taking advantage of the funding.”
“We haven’t made any decisions yet locally,” he said. “We’re constantly working at trying to deal with our vast, unmet need here. We hope the folks from the Genesis Community Loan Fund are going to be helpful partners in addressing those needs, but we haven’t entered into a contract with them for any services as of yet, but we plan to.”
Sanborn said the housing needs are high in the Presque Isle area.
“We have approximately 100 houses that we manage. Of those, 66 units are in our main village located near Presque Isle. We had a third party engineering firm come in and do a capital needs assessment, and of those 66 houses, it was found that for most — if not all — of those units, it would be more cost efficient to knock them down and build new ones than to repair them,” he said. “In other words, they’re in extremely bad shape.
“Those 66 units are currently occupied, and we have a wait list of about 30 households that are low-income people that need help. We’ve been working with a variety of partners — Genesis being one of them — to seek out alternative funding both for planning and for what other grant opportunities are out there that we can go after,” said Sanborn. “The amount of funds that we receive a year to run our housing program is inadequate and has been inadequate, and that’s why we have houses that are in the state that they are in.”
Sanborn said the Micmac housing issue is two-fold.
“Our current stock that we actually do have is substandard and in need of replacement,” he said, “and then we have a whole other set of folks that need a house of any sort. We’re just trying to figure out a plan of action that would be able to address both of those needs.”
The USDA awarded $6.3 million in grants for 31 projects in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Funding is contingent upon the recipients meeting the terms of their grant agreements.
