Most municipal officials can tell me what their town received in HUD Community Development Block Grant funds last year. Fewer can tell me what they signed to get it.
Every recipient of federal financial assistance signs an assurance of compliance. It is a condition of the money. The condition is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: no person shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
That assurance does not expire when the grant closes out.
Two features catch towns off guard. Coverage is institution-wide — if one department accepts covered assistance, the obligation reaches the whole entity. A town that took American Rescue Plan Act money for water infrastructure did not scope its obligation to the water department. And the obligation flows down to subrecipients. If you pass money to a nonprofit running a senior program, you are responsible for their compliance. Most towns have never asked one for an assurance.
Where the obligation attaches
Title VI is written in general terms, which is why it gets treated as an abstraction and why towns end up with a policy on a shelf. In our audits we locate it in four operational domains. Each is a question with an answer in the town’s own records.
Employment. Does every resident have an equal opportunity to work for the town? One caution: Title VI’s reach into employment is limited by statute, and Title VII and state law usually do the heavier lifting. But the analysis belongs in the audit, because employment shapes everything downstream.
Purchasing and procurement. Does every business have an equal opportunity to contract with the town? Vendor lists tend to be short, stable, and unexamined. Pull three years of awards and compare them against the qualified vendors in your market.
Service delivery and programs. Who uses what the town provides, and who does not? This is the heart of Title VI and the domain towns measure least. Utilization by demographic group, benchmarked against the resident population, tells you more in an afternoon than a year of good intentions.
Boards and commissions. Does every resident have an equal opportunity to serve and be heard? The regulations expressly prohibit denying someone participation as a member of a planning or advisory body integral to a covered program.
Language access runs through all four. Failing to provide meaningful access to residents who do not speak English can itself constitute national origin discrimination.
What changed in 2026, and what did not
Between December 2025 and July 2026, federal funding agencies amended their Title VI regulations to remove disparate-impact provisions. The Department of Health and Human Services rule took effect July 24, 2026. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed the same. Agencies will now pursue enforcement on intentional discrimination, not effects alone.
Here is what did not change. The statutory prohibition is intact. State law obligations are intact. And the agencies that removed disparate-impact liability kept the data expectations — and said plainly that the same data can prove intentional discrimination.
The numbers did not stop mattering. They changed jobs.
A town that responds to 2026 by collecting less data has made itself less able to answer the question it will actually be asked.
Where to start
You do not need a consultant to begin. You need ninety minutes and four data pulls: workforce composition by department, three years of contract awards, utilization for your two largest resident-facing programs, and the roster and applicant pool for every board.
Then ask: compared to what?
If you cannot answer that for any of the four, you have found the place to start. Most towns cannot answer it for any of them. That is not a failure of commitment. It is a failure of instrumentation, and it is fixable.
The assurance is already signed. The only question is whether you can show your work.