RISON - Rison Mayor Charles Roberts is asking anyone willing to help conduct a local door-to-door survey to determine the the percentage of low-to-moderate income (LMI) households within the Rison area to attend a special meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 29, at Rison City Hall.
Roberts said the survey is to being conducted to challenge the City of Rison’s official LMI percentage of 47.9 percent. That percentage was established by the 2020 census.
The mayor explained that most federal and state grant programs are only available to those communities where the percentage of LMI households is 51 percent or greater. Roberts said Rison’s LMI has traditionally been above that 51 percent threshold, and he believes it still is.
Roberts said the survey will not only include the City of Rison, but the service area of the Rison Fire Department as well. One of the motives for conducting the survey is to put the city in a better position for grant money to buy a new fire truck for the Rison Fire Department. Since the fire department’s service area extends beyond the Rison city limits, Roberts said those households will also be included in the survey.
LMI measures the percentage of households within a given area that are at 80 percent or lower of the area median income (AMI). Since AMI can differ from one community to another, there is no set income figures that is used nationally. The official AMI number for Cleveland County is $78,900, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Earlier this month, Roberts told the Rison City Council that there are 1,014 physical addresses within the targeted area. He said he preferred to have 10 two-person teams conduct the survey within a two-week period in mid-August, coinciding with the start of the new school year. He said his idea is to break up the area so each team has about the same number of households to survey.
The survey itself will consist of of four basic questions that were developed by a special…