Village of Stevensville seeking out grants to fix streets
STEVENSVILLE, Mich. -- The Village of Stevensville is seeking out grants to help fund road repairs and fill their potholes.
“Our local streets are looking okay, it’s really our major streets that are the challenge,” says Kacey Dominguez, Village Manager for the Village of Stevensville in Monday night’s board meeting.
Ten street projects and an estimated $5 million to complete them is what the council is faced with.
Voters banned marijuana dispensaries in the primaries, but the shops would have pumped nearly $100,000 into the village a year.
Now, the council is looking at eligible grants to help fund the costly projects.
“Realistically, we’re looking at one to two major road projects every four years,” Dominguez says.
An MDOT Community Service grant would help to cover the costs of fixing up the village’s local roads, with a $250,000 max, but the village needs to match 50% of those funds.
A federal grant called the Transportation Improvement Program would help fix up the major roadways of Stevensville, with no max and an 18% match.
However, the grants still make road repairs costly for the village, which has over $300,000 available to fund major roads and $90,000 for local roads.
“Even with these TIP grants, there’s still significant costs for the village because these major roads are all a million dollar plus projects,” explains Dominguez.
There aren’t too many other options left for the village, so board members agreed to file the necessary applications for which roads they see fit to be fixed up in the first round of funding distribution.
“Next month, we’ll come back with a resolution of support and submit our applications and the first round we’ll hear back in September ‘23 for projects in spring ‘24,” Dominguez says.
The applications for these grants are due in June, so the next steps for the board is to submit the applications then find out in September if they will receive the funds, the funds would be available after October 1st.