The Butler Couty Housing and Redevelopment Authority awarded a $176,450 contract Friday, Sept. 8, for the rehabilitation of a home in Slippery Rock Township.

Edward Mauk, CEO for the authority, said the rehabilitation will be funded by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program grants.

“If you’re a low-income homeowner, and you need repair work done on the home, but can’t afford to do it, it’s designed to help people stay in their homes,” he said.

The contract was awarded by the redevelopment authority to Wise and Son Construction for the rehabilitation of 274 Centreville Pike.

“So what we do is we’ll go in and issue a grant to the homeowner and have a contractor go in and bring the home up to code,” Mauk said.

The rehabilitation stipulates a five-year lien on the property, he said, preventing the owner from reselling, or “flipping,” it.

“If you don’t keep some of the homes up to code, they become blight, and they end up getting condemned,” Mauk said. “And then people don’t have homes.”

With the recent retirement of the program’s grant manager, Mauk also told the board that the authority is considering a cap on the program’s awards.

“We’ve had a transition in our own program manager,” he said. “Our previous manager always told us we couldn’t cap the HOME program, so that’s why some of these are larger.”

Working with the new program manager, Mauk said the authority was looking at a cap for the awards to mitigate the more “significant” costs.

He floated the idea of capping it around $100,000.

“The problem is, it really does depend on where you’re at and what you’re doing,” he said. “If you get into something that has a sewage issue and you’ve got to fix the sewage, that’s a major cost in order to bring the home up to code.”

He reiterated that the program did not allow partial rehabilitation and required the authority to bring the awardee’s home entirely up to code.

“So we want to make sure it’s high enough that we don’t eliminate all the participants,” Mauk said, “but not so high that we’re putting so much money into one single property.”

The Owner-Occupied Rehabilitation Program currently has funding for homeowners in Center, Oakland, Concord, Clay, Worth, Slippery Rock, Jefferson, Muddy Creek, Portersville, Franklin, Penn, Summit, Donegal and Clearfield townships.

For more information, or to join to the waiting list, visit housingauthority.com.

Any changes to the program will be brought to the board for approval first, according to Mauk.

“We’re going to look at our program and see what number makes the most sense,” he said, “and then we’ll bring that back because that would be a policy direction of the board.”