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Friday, 18 September 2009 |
By KAREN CAMPBELL
Assistant Managing Editor
At least one area of Auglaize County is to receive some grant assistance from the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program.
“We OK’d one project in the county,” said Auglaize County Administrator Joe Lenhart, who serves as the county’s representative on a regional committee to determine how funding would be split.
He said an abandoned house south of Buckland is planned to be torn down and removed, and the ground around it cleared with the $20,000 allocated to Auglaize County.
Only certain areas of the county were eligible to use the funding and they had to be in low- to moderate- income areas.
“I talked with the mayors and we originally had one or two more suggested, but they fell through,” Lenhart said of how this particular location was chosen.
The region, which included Auglaize, Shelby and Miami counties, and the cities of Troy, Piqua and Sidney, received more than $1.1 million through the federal program, but Shelby and Auglaize, which had less need, approved the more urban areas to receive more of the funding to help their projects go further.
“We didn’t have as much of a need, so we both decided to do one project, at about $20,000 each,” Lenhart said.
The Auglaize County project has been submitted for approval and is ready to proceed once the Ohio Historical Society gives its blessing.
“We’ve put our specs together, but we probably won’t do it until next spring,” Lenhart.
Funding came from the state’s Department of Development under Title III of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act passed in 2008.
The regional group received grant funding in June, but first began meeting in February to discuss how they might want to divvy up the dollars. Lenhart said they gave up one of their projects to give Miami County more to work with as they tore down houses and built homes with Habitat for Humanity.
“We’re looking at one project with the money we got, but if we have enough left over, we could do another,” Lenhart said.
He said there were no homes in the county condemned by the Health Department that would qualify.
“We sat around and discussed our needs,” Lenhart said of the regional group. “When we got done our wish list was about $2 million. We started dwindling it down to see how the money could best be divided and used.”
He said originally this funding was expected to be the first round of the program, but a second round now is to be a much more competitive process with a majority of funds going to bigger areas in more need.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 September 2009 )
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