(Spencer)– City officials in Spencer are urging those who sustained damage in the June flood who have not already done so to apply for a variety of micro grants before time and funding runs out. Planning Director Adam Severson updated the city council on the applications at last week’s Spencer City Council meeting…
“So the foundation repair grant is up to 71 applications received with a total of $206,000 sent to Finance of the $200,000 approved budget. This grant is trending down and approximately 15 foundations appear to be still compromised. Staff is working with those property owners to help secure them and give them proper information to keep water lines from freezing and foundations from being further compromised. The red X repair grant, 48 applications have been received and sent to Finance totaling $48,000 or approximately 50 percent of that approved budget so that’s about half way through and those are trending down greatly, so anyone that’s watching this I would just recommend that if you had a red or orange X be sure to utilize that grant to help repair what was painted. The right-of-way grant is also sitting at 48 applications. These are slower to process because many property owners have elected to perform the grading or seeding of their right-of-way area in the spring. And then also the large grant, the rental property grant, 140 applications have now been received within the first two weeks of administering this grant. Staff is currently working with the property owners on site verification as a majority of these projects were kind of retroactively completed prior to site inspections.”
Severson estimates the program is around 65 percent of the $300,000 allocated for it. He says about 80 to 85 of those applications have been forwarded to the city’s Finance Department.
