(Estherville)– The Estherville City Council Monday voted to renew the city’s Neighborhood Grant Facade program for another year. The program provides assistance to homeowners who make repairs to the outside of their dwelling. City Administrator Penny Clayton says they’ve seen good results from it in the past…
“We’ve seen a lot of improvements on properties, not only the ones that are grant funded, but surrounding properties to those. We’d like to do this again. If you remember it’s a matching grant program so the maximum award would be $4,000 and that would be on an $8,000 project or more. If they had a $6,000 project it would be a $3,000 grant. So we do 50 percent up to a maximum of $4,000. They are competitive and so we would open that up this fall and the applications would be due by November 14th. We’d start taking applications on October 8th. Between now and then we would run some adds and let people know that it’s out there, but we would start taking applications on the 8th, go through November 14th.”
Clayton says Excel Estherville will then review the applications and make a recommendation to the city council as to which ones should be awarded funds…
“Generally we get about 30 applications each time. We usually award somewhere between 10 and 12. We have 10 in the budget. There have been properties that have been awarded that haven’t completed their project so those monies are still set aside so some years we use those.”
Clayton says projects typically funded the most are those in which a house is being re-sided or re-painted.
