PANAMA CITY — City commissioners took a $35,000 step into the unknown during Tuesday’s meeting.
Acting as the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) board, commissioners embarked on a pilot program offering residential housing grants in the Downtown North district. The program is the first of its kind in the CRA to allocate $35,000 as “gap fill” money for housing repairs without dollar-for-dollar matching or repayment requirements.
“We don’t know if this will work,” said William Whitson, CRA director. “We also don’t know that it won’t. And we don’t know that we may have stumbled onto a new and improved model and a better way of doing business.”