Improvement projects across Columbia — from rehabilitating homes to building bus shelters to providing music classes to poor children — could feel the pinch of federal budget cuts proposed Monday by President Bush.

Mayor Bob Coble is so worried for the city’s community development money that he has scheduled a trip to Washington next week to fight for the funds.

“It will have just as much impact on our neglected neighborhoods as a Category 5 hurricane,” he said.

Specifically, the president calls for drastic cuts in the Community Development Block Grant program, which has sent more than $49 million to Columbia — and leveraged an additional $177 million — since 1978.

Bush would consolidate CDBG — which is funded this year at $4.7 billion — into an initiative with 17 other programs and spend $3.7 billion on them.

“This budget reflects some of the tough choices we must make to continue meeting our nation’s key priorities,” said Alphonso Jackson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Merging the development programs, HUD officials said, would “increase accountability so federal development dollars actually make a concrete difference in distressed areas.”

SEED MONEY

Patricia Wilson Clayton is a retired English teacher who grew up in Columbia’s Waverly neighborhood, where the city already has spent more than $387,000 in CDBG money for land acquisition and demolition of a block of old homes.

She remembers a neighborhood of well-kept homes with fine-trimmed lawns. Though she moved out six years ago, she recently agreed to sell her house on McDuffy Street to the Columbia Housing Development Corp. because she could not afford to rehabilitate it herself.

“This is a wonderful downtown neighborhood that needs to be revitalized,” said Clayton, who now lives in the Eau Claire neighborhood. “It seems the trend of neglecting the inner, older city neighborhoods will continue.”

Columbia development officials worry most about neighborhoods with projects in the pipeline — such as Waverly, where city officials plan to apply for at least $2 million more in CDBG money to build affordable housing for as many as 25 families.

If Congress deems the president’s idea worthy, the Waverly project might not be completed, said Deborah Livingston, executive director of the Housing Development Corp.

Columbia gets relatively few CDBG dollars compared with larger cities, said Richard Semon, the city’s community development director. Since 1998, for example, Columbia has averaged about $1.5 million a year while Chicago has received close to $100 million annually.

But the money is used to seed projects and leverages sums many times larger, he said. The $49.3 million in CDBG funds Columbia has received since 1978 has garnered an additional $177 million, much of it from private lenders, he said.

Much of the seed money for the rebirth of the Congaree Vista came from the CDBG coffer.

It’s ironic that a Republican president would want to cut CDBG, Semon said.

“The thing people are forgetting is this is a Republican president’s initiative to empower local communities to address problems instead of having the federal government do it for them,” he said, referring to President Nixon, under whose administration CDBG was founded in 1975.

One of the things he prizes about CDBG, Semon said, is its flexibility. As Livingston put it: “It doesn’t come with a lot of strings attached.”

‘A BUDGET FREEZE

U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., doesn’t see such a bleak picture.

The administration still wants to give billions of dollars to cities and towns for development, he said, but the president is also mindful of the national deficit.

Wilson estimates the overall cut in community development programs at 5 percent to 10 percent.

“What the president is proposing, and which I support, is a budget freeze, except in national defense or homeland security,” said Wilson, who represents those Columbia neighborhoods not represented by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C. “We’ve got to look at the whole budget picture.”

Overall, the president’s $2.57 trillion federal budget proposal — which is Congress’ to alter over the next several months — increases military spending by about 5 percent. It cuts domestic programs by margins not seen in more than 20 years.

About 150 programs, including CDBG, would be eliminated or reduced. The deficit would weigh in at $390 billion.

Clyburn, whose district includes many of the Columbia neighborhoods targeted by the city’s redevelopment efforts, called Bush’s proposal “devastating.” How the big picture of the proposed budget looks depends on where you live, he said.

“It’s a mean budget,” he said, if you live in a neighborhood that desperately needs CDBG money.

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com.