(KAIR)--The city of Atchison is in the process of applying for a federal grant that seeks to improve sidewalks in a section of the city.

City Public Works and Utilities Director Justin Pregont, informed City Commissioners during a meeting Monday, that the Kansas Department of Commerce is administering a special funding cycle for the Community Development Block Grant that is equal to their annual allocation. He says the grant usually requires cities to provide 50 percent of the funding for a project, but in this special case, the city would only have to pay 10 percent.

 However, the time given to apply for the grant is very short. Pregont says “what's difficult about this is that they gave us an extremely narrow time frame to make these applications...just because of the demographic circumstances of our city and the size of our city, most projects that we would put together would require a community survey. The community survey takes a certain amount of time to put together, to send out, and to  aggregate and certify. So we would not be able to make the other programmatic deadlines that are contingent in the grant.”

Pregont says that since the a survey could not be done, the city was limited in how they could prepare the application, and “the only option that we had was to do something at what is called the census track block group level. The city of Atchison has twelve or fifteen different census track block groups. There are several of them which qualify for this funding based on what is called a percentage of low to moderate income residents.”

The grant requires the project effect every resident in the block group, and Pregont says officials believe they have found an area in the city that meets the guidelines. The project planned “is a sidewalk project in what is our smallest census track block group...the area that composes that block group starts at Sixth and Santa Fe, and that's the southeast corner, and the northwest corner of that would be at approximately Twelfth and Laramie.”

Pregont says the application requires approval from the City Commission, and will be presented to them for a vote during their May 4th meeting.