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Business Programs | Cooperative Development Programs | Homeownership Programs | Rental Housing Programs | Community Facilities Programs | Water and Waste Program | Telecommunications Program | Electric Program | Management Initiatives | Resource Summaries
In order to stretch its resources, RHS is actively developing leveraging partnerships. The purposes of these partnerships are to encourage lender participation in providing financing to rural communities. The effort to move families off of welfare and into work requires the availability of affordable quality day care, which is often more limited in rural America. This can present a real barrier to a family who is trying to move out of poverty. RHS' community facilities programs can be used to finance both child and adult day care.
Coordination with other Federal programs enhances the delivery of the Community Facilities programs under the appropriate circumstances. Proposed projects must meet the standards of the Environmental Protection Agency and health facilities must meet the standards of Health and Human Services, in the same sense that they must meet the zoning and construction requirement of the state, county, or local government. These are issues of concern handled by the applicant’s engineer. Other Federal agencies, such as the Economic Development Agency or Indian Health Service, or state agencies may be potential partners for joint funding if a specific project meets their requirements. RHS program dollars also help State government programs and non-profit organizations leverage their resources.
RHS loan guaranteed programs enable private sector lenders to get more involved in rural financing. The guaranteed programs bring otherwise unavailable long term, fixed rate private sector credit to rural areas.
Verification and Validation: Several performance indicators address the overall impact of the Community Facilities program while others support the various categories of projects normally funded by the program. One overall measure is an assessment of the number of rural residents whose quality of life will be improved by the Community Facilities projects financed during the fiscal year. This is, and will always be, a soft estimate but it is an attempt by the Agency to quantify the impact of the Community Facilities program on the rural population it serves. It cannot, in fact, be specifically measured, even at the end of the fiscal year, as there is a wide variation in the impact of projects and most have an impact far beyond the city limits of the town in which it is located. For example, the expansion of a hospital will provide improved medical care, and an improved quality of life, for people living miles from the town in which the hospital is located.
A second way the impact of the total program is quantified is through the estimation of the number of jobs created or retained as a result of the expenditure of Federal funds in the rural communities. This measure is also used by the other Rural Development agencies. Community Facilities funds are often construction related and the impact is established through the use of economic multipliers developed by the Department of Commerce.
Data to measure the performance measures will come from the following automated accounting systems:
• Program Loan Accounting System (PLAS)
• Guaranteed Loan Accounting System (GLAS)
• Rural Community Facilities Tracking System (RCFTS)
These systems are used by agency managers in their management of the programs. PLAS and GLAS are accounting systems designed to manage the agency’s portfolio of direct and guaranteed loans. These systems contains a variety of data edits to minimize the risk of inaccurate data being placed in the systems. These two systems are audited annually by OIG as a part of their development of an audited financial statement.
RCFTS is a non-accounting management system which contains a variety of data related to Community Facilities projects, e.g., community populations and number of people served by each project. Data in RCFTS is input by the field staff and does not contain edits to verify the accuracy of the data. Manual reports from State Director will be used to obtain data regarding several of the performance measures. This information will be less reliable since it is obtained manually and its accuracy cannot be verified. However, confidence in this data is high enough to be acceptable for the purposes for which it is being used.