House Passes Appropriations Package Including More Than $5 Million in Funding for Louisville Projects Requested by Congressman Yarmuth

WASHINGTON - Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 4502, a seven-bill government funding appropriations package that invests in America to create good-paying jobs, expand opportunities for the middle class and small businesses, and provide a lifeline for working families and the vulnerable.

Included in the legislation is more than $5 million in Community Project Funding requests secured by Congressman John Yarmuth (KY-03). Yarmuth secured the funding requests through the House Appropriations Committee's Community Project Funding process. The legislation now awaits consideration by the United States Senate as both chambers work through the full appropriations process.

'As our economic recovery progresses and we work to emerge from this pandemic in the safest and smartest way possible, it's important that we continue to make critical investments in Louisville,' said Yarmuth. 'I'm proud that all 10 of my projects were included in this legislation and I will continue to fight to make sure our city gets the resources we need to come out of this pandemic stronger than before. We have made tremendous progress with the American Rescue Plan, but our work is not finished.'

All 10 of Yarmuth's community project funding requests were approved at the full amount requested, totaling $5,235,000. The projects requested include:

Community Project	Funding
Bellarmine Community Health Profession Simulation Center	$1,000,000
Black and Diverse Business Wealth Initiative	$250,000
Chef Space Consumer-Packaged Goods Expansion	$330,000
Maple Street Park Project	$500,000
Park DuValle Community Odor Control Improvements	$480,000
Louisville Metro Government Sidewalk Rehabilitation	$1,000,000
YouthBuild Louisville Smoketown Hopebox Phase 2	$600,000
Study to Address Severe Riverbank Erosion Threatening Chickasaw Park	$100,000
Unity House	$225,000
UofL Advanced Manufacturing Training Program for Underserved Communities	$750,000
Total Community Project Funding for Kentucky's Third District	$5,235,000

Details and a summary of each of the 10 community project funding requests secured by Yarmuth can be found below.

In total, the appropriations package supports our nation's workers, students, and families by providing $253.8 billion for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies, including transformative increases for childcare, education, job training, worker protection, public health infrastructure, and biomedical research.

The bill tackles hunger, rebuilds our public health and consumer safety infrastructure, confronts the climate crisis, and ensures equity with $26.5 billion for the Department of Agriculture, including rural development programs, the Food and Drug Administration, and related agencies.

The appropriations package creates good-paying jobs by confronting the climate crisis and rebuilding our nation's water infrastructure, providing $53.2 billion for the Department of Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and related agencies.

The bill supports small businesses, protects our democracy, rebuilds the Internal Revenue Service, and strengthens consumer protection by providing $29.1 billion for the Department of the Treasury, The Judiciary, the Election Assistance Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and other general government agencies.

The appropriations package creates good-paying jobs in renewable energy, strengthens environmental enforcement with a focus on environmental justice, and supports Native American families with $43.4 billion for the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Indian Health Services.

The bill supports our veterans, invests in military family housing, and protects our national security while building climate resilience, providing $279.9 billion for military construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and related agencies.

Finally, the appropriations package creates jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, grows opportunity through homeownership and rental assistance, and promote safe transportation and public housing by providing $84.1 billion for the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development and related agencies.

Yarmuth Community Project Funding Requests

Bellarmine Community Health Profession Simulation Center
Funding for Bellarmine University's community health simulation center will be used to provide state-of-the-art equipment for experiential learning opportunities for students. Research has demonstrated that well-designed simulation activities allow healthcare professionals to engage in patient care more effectively and in increasingly complex healthcare environments. Simulated learning activities also help mimic clinical scenarios and provide students with contemporary, evidence-based instruction in simulated work and patient care situations. The center will provide students with experience-based learning, strengthen our local health care workforce, and better ensure the health and wellness of our community.

Black and Diverse Business Wealth Initiative
Funding for Louisville Metro Government's Black and Diverse Business Wealth Initiative will be used for a workforce development program to provide training directly to businesses and entrepreneurs to help build capacity for Black and diverse business enterprises in the city. Louisville Metro Government estimates that more than $5 billion will be invested locally in public and private capital infrastructure investments over the next five years, but only 2.4 percent of Louisville's businesses are Black-owned, far less than the city's Black population of 22 percent. In 2020, Louisville announced the Equity in Contracting Task Force via Executive Order of the Mayor with the specific goal of increasing the number of Black and diverse businesses in the city. The Black and Diverse Business Wealth Initiative will help the city make progress toward that goal.

Chef Space Consumer-Packaged Goods Expansion
Funding for Chef Space will be used to provide equipment, storage, and space to allow for a growing consumer packaged goods operation at the West Louisville food incubator's site in the Russell neighborhood. Chef Space provides commercial kitchen space and business training for entrepreneurs to start food related ventures as a means for economic security. They focus on inclusive growth and opportunity in the community, where two-thirds of the entrepreneurs they serve are persons of color and more than half are women. This funding would allow them to reimagine their space to provide for a robust food packaging operation to better serve their members and the community.

Maple Street Park Project
Funding for Louisville Parks Foundation's Maple Street Park project will be used to support the Foundation's partnership with residents and public, private, and non-profit entities to transform seven city blocks in West Louisville's California neighborhood into a 20-plus acre public park. Only 1 percent of land in the California neighborhood is currently dedicated to parks or open space. The land, acquired by Louisville MSD through a Federal Emergency Management Agency Hazard Mitigation Grant, is permanently conserved as greenspace but is currently unusable in its current state. The Maple Street Park project would fill a critical gap in walkable access to outdoor recreation and help foster environmental equity for citizens in this historically disinvested community.

Park DuValle Community Odor Control Improvements
Funding will enable Louisville and Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) to make repairs at 109 locations in the Park DuValle neighborhood to prevent odor-causing hydrogen sulfide gases from escaping the sewers. While MSD already invests more than $1 million annually to address customer concerns through sewer main flushing and the cleaning and deodorizing of catch basins, this funding will enable them to install and rehabilitate catch basin traps where odors can persist, especially in hot, dry summer months.

Louisville Metro Government Sidewalk Rehabilitation
Funding for Louisville Metro Government's sidewalk rehabilitation will go toward repairing or replacing city sidewalks to help remove barriers to accessibility, improve modal choice, and enhance pedestrian safety. The city plans to rehabilitate sidewalks by the following criteria: where entire blocks of sidewalks are rated the worst, within Environmental Justice areas, within areas with high concentrations of households with no vehicles available, within areas with a high number of pedestrian crashes, and within close proximity of schools.

YouthBuild Louisville Smoketown Hopebox Phase 2
Funding for YouthBuild Louisville's Smoketown Hopebox will be used to continue revitalization efforts centered in the city's Smoketown neighborhood. The project aims to reimagine a traditional community center as a shared community space that will house a laundromat, health clinic, business incubator, flex space, and more. Working with more than a dozen local partners, including the University of Louisville and IDEAS xLab, YouthBuild Louisville's Smoketown Hopebox project would help provide much-needed amenities to an underserved community in Louisville.

Study to Address Severe Riverbank Erosion Threatening Chickasaw Park
Funding for a feasibility study to address severe riverbank erosion in Chickasaw Park will enable Wilderness Louisville to conduct a study concerning ongoing erosion issues and bank failure problems along the park's shoreline of the Ohio River. The study-conducted with the support of the United States Army Corps of Engineers-would evaluate potential construction remedies and allow the project to be eligible for future federal funding, which would be supported by local matches to complete design and construction. The effort to study the ongoing erosion issues at Chickasaw Park was a key recommendation of the West Louisville Outdoor Recreation Initiative in their 2016 Master Plan, intended to create equitable opportunities for residents to connect with outdoor spaces.

Unity House
The funding for Volunteers of America Mid-States' Unity House-one of the only shelters in Jefferson County where families experiencing homelessness can stay together while receiving support-would be used to make critical improvements to the facility, including repairs and renovations of two non-functioning resident bathrooms, as well as Unity House's kitchen and cafeteria space. The Unity House program works to keep families unified and safe, keeping children out of foster care and providing long-term, comprehensive support services, educational opportunities, and employment readiness training.

UofL Advanced Manufacturing Training Program for Underserved Communities
The funding for the University of Louisville's Robotics and Additive Manufacturing Pathways to SUCCESS (RAMPS) program would be used to help address the shortage of labor in the skilled manufacturing sector and enhance employment opportunities for underrepresented groups. The university plans to enroll 200 students in the program annually, providing critical advanced manufacturing skills to future workers and targeting emerging technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence (A.I.), and 3D printing. RAMPS will provide multiple pathways to completing related industry-certified training and will empower manufacturers big and small to evaluate robotic, additive manufacturing and A.I. solutions, and successfully apply the right solution to any given manufacturing process and operation.

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