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Atchison To Apply For Two Grants

By Joel Hardy

10/20/2015

(KAIR)--The Atchison City Commission, on Monday, gave approval to city staff to apply for two grants that would supply the funding needed to make several improvements in the city.

City Finance Director Becky Anderson says the first grant is through the Kansas Department of Commerce, which has a time period where a city can apply for funding in various categories. But “because our community does not LMI...which is low to moderate income qualify, we cannot apply for several of those options, but one exception to that is if you are doing ADA improvements. So we are able to do a project that is downtown to improve sidewalks and ADA ramps because it is an ADA project. So it's really one of the only options that are available to us until we can get a survey to see if we actually do community wide LMI qualify.”

Anderson adds that if the grant is approved, it would go a long way towards helping the city improve their infrastructure. She says that “it will help stretch our sidewalk dollars. We have already got funding for ADA improvements in our CIP for next year, and then we have also got additional funding for city improvements to sidewalks, so basically it will stretch those dollars further. It's about a fifty percent match, so doubling our funds basically.”

The second grant, Anderson says, comes from an annual Kansas Department of Transportation program that seeks to offer city residents an alternative to driving. She says that “the last two years, we have applied for the Riverfront Trail, which has not gotten funded because they have said that it is a recreational trail and they do not want to fund it, but we are going to put it in anyway just to say that we really care about this project. And then last year, we also applied for a streetscape on the 800 block of Commercial Street, so to further that streetscape...it stops at the 700 block right now. So we are going to reapply for that one, and then the one that we think has the best chance of getting funded is to do sidewalk improvements from downtown to Benedictine College.”

Anderson says the city expects to find out if both grants were approved or not by sometime next year.

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