(Spencer)– The Spencer City Council Monday evening heard from City Manager Kevin Robinson on plans for the city to apply for Community Development Block Grant Disaster Relief funds. Robinson says they’ve identified several infrastructure and housing projects that they plan to apply for…
“One is storm sewer separation. There’s five areas of town that are not separated yet and we think we can get hopefully all of them covered, if not, we want to cover as much as we can through this program. We’re looking at the wastewater treatment plant mitigation, meaning protection from flooding. So we’re working with the engineering designs on how to create some type of earth berm system, whatever that might be. We think we could apply for that project through the D R funds. And then lift station improvements. There’s a series of upgrades and mitigation measures that we can do on those lift stations to protect those in the future, keep them operating. On the housing side, we’re drilling down into a couple of different single family projects for new housing as well as we’ve had interest from two developers on rental housing properties, so we’re working through those.”
Robinson says he’s cautiously optimistic over the city’s chances of being approved for the assistance…
“There was just under $140 million allocated to the entire state; 80 percent of those funds will go to the heavily impacted disaster counties, we’re one of those, 80 percent of those funds. And then in there it’s divided up in these different areas. It’s heavily competitive. A handful of towns were significantly damaged. We’re one of those, so we want to be strategic in our applications for projects. We want to present projects that we think we can get funded. We don’t want to over-apply.”
Robinson added he’ll be bringing the applications to the city council in the next 4 to 6 weeks. He says the awards should be announced in January, 2027.
