The City of Lansing already had plans for a streetscape project in REO Town – they just didn’t know how they were going to pay for all of it.
“We meet with the
REO Town Commercial Association to find out what they’d like,” says Chad Gamble, Public Service Director for the City of Lansing. “We kind of developed a priority list just in case. We thought it would be fantastic to get some money for this somehow, but we didn’t have it.”
A fortunate phone call the day before City Hall closed for Memorial Day this year changed all of that. Gamble received news of a Transportation, Community and System Preservation Grant from the Federal Highway Administration that could make the full REO Town project possible. The only trouble was that while most grant applications take a month or more to complete, this one was due the Tuesday following the holiday.
“So we went to work and over the course of the weekend put together a grant application,” says Gamble.
The overtime paid off. The City of Lansing was awarded $326,200 to assist with the $2.3M REO Town project.
“This allowed us to do a complete extreme makeover,” says Gamble. “This will help transition REO Town from an underutilized area to a place with a vibrant power station and lots of commerce.”
Construction on the project is scheduled to coordinate with the
power plant development and will occur in two phases, the first beginning in 2012 and the second in 2013.