(Spirit Lake)– The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously today (Tues.) to sign on as a sponsor for a grant application through the NRCS for the Francis Sites Wetland project. John Wills of the Cleanwater Alliance is writing the grant on the county’s behalf. He says they’ll be requesting somewhere around $350,000…
“And that would include finishing the fundraising for the complete Francis Sites wetland project as well as any other minor expenses or costs that might be incurred. So basically what it means to the county and what it means to the city of Spirit Lake is the $200,000 that you’ve committed plus the money that you’ve already spent would be all that you would be putting forth for the project and project partners would fund the remaining almost $1 million.”
Will says they are fairly optimistic over the possibility of landing the grant…
“Some folks from Des Moines did come up last week on Thursday or Wednesday and took a look at it and they’re pretty encouraged. They have a lot of planning grant requests for a lot of money but very few implementation requests. This project will be an implementation project and implementation projects get priority for funding, and so there’s 125 million nationwide for projects such as this and so we would be asking for $300,00 to $400,000. They’re pretty encouraged thinking this would be a pretty high priority project.”
Wills says they should know whether or not they’ll be awarded the grant around October 1st.
In other business, the supervisors also approved a request from County Engineer Dan Eckert to move up plans to replace a bridge on 110th Avenue in Westport Township to the fiscal year 2021. That bridge is structurally deficient and was recently closed to traffic. In order to bump it, two projects currently scheduled for that same timeframe will be pushed back. One of those is the Lower Gar Outlet.
