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Council To Reapply For VDHCD Grant
Goshen is moving forward with plans to build a community center in town, but is breaking the construction into more phases in hopes of getting a grant to fund the project.
At the Goshen Town Council’s regular business meeting on March 5, Vice-Mayor Steve Bickley reported on a meeting that he and other members of Council and the public attended with representatives from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. The meeting primarily centered around the town’s application for a $1.25 million Community Development Block Grant that would have been used to help fund the community center project. The application was denied earlier this year and the goal of the meeting was to see if there was any way for the town to improve their application to receive the grant.
Bickley said that the town had applied for the $1.25 million grant with the intent of using the money as matching funds for other grants from the Appalachian Regional Commission and the United States Department of Agriculture to fund the entire $3.5 million project, something that a representative from the VDHCD had advised them to do. The committee that scored the applications “had a different opinion about that,” Bickley said.
In the meeting, the VDHCD representatives explained that there are seven categories on which grant applications are scored, and while they said that the town did “really, really well” in the first five categories, the last two, which considered how ready the town was to begin building the facility, were where the town’s application was scored low enough to deny them the grant.
“In their heads, we asked for $1.25 million to build a $3.5 million building, so in their interpretation, we were not prepared, so we didn’t do well in those categories,” Bickley explained. He added that, had the town applied for the grant with a facility that would cost $1.25 million, the representatives from the VDHCD had felt confident that the application would have been approved.
“They felt like, in the first five sections, it was one of the better applications that they’ve seen, and we scored very well in all that in their eyes,” Bickley said. “Based on what they said we need to go do is ask for $1.25 million to build a $1.25 million building.”
Bickley proposed breaking the project into smaller phases and building the community center in phases, reapplying for a new grant with each completed portion of the facility. The first building constructed would have space for services from the Rockbridge Area Health Center, including medical, dental and substance abuse services, as well as a space that could be used by multiple organizations that would only be there once a week. The second phase of construction would be for space for the Rockbridge Area Relief Association’s food bank and the Valley Program for Aging Services. Until that building is completed, those services would be run out of the house that stands on the property the town purchased to build the community center.
“The whole goal of this is to do it without having to use town money to build anything,” Bickley said. “VDHCD is [the] only place we can do that, so we’ll just break the project up into smaller bites and keep rolling. As we get one facility up and running, we’ll apply for the next $1.25 million.”
Newly-appointed council member Amy Tesich seconded Bickley’s motion to break the project into phases and reapply for the grant. The motion passed in a 3-0 vote, with Bickley, Tesich and Derrick Ogden voting in favor. Council members Chris Robertson and Mike Hicks were absent from the meeting.
